


Let it Bleed

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Black Lagoon
Genre: F/M, Gen, Other, Surprise Guest Appearances from China
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 16:45:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9771035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: Madness, mayhem, and a body count huge enough for General Westmoreland: A psycho circus is coming to town, or crash-landing at the airport, anyway, and Revy and Eda scent cash's spoor.  As per usual, Rock's dragged along in their wake, a loyal knight in a starched collar and a teal tie.His world's melted down into hot blood, cold beer, and a relationship with a hard-edged psychopath whose meaning to him is best taken with a Rolling Stones symphony.





	

“Hey, 'd'ja hear what shit happened down at the airport, Dutch?” Revy was _effulgent_ ; that's what Rock thought, anyway, peering up from the accounting ledger's tedious vagaries, the _acreages_ of numbers that had no meaning whatsoever to him, were only abstractions for something that was something he only tangentially felt. He knew their importance to Dutch, which was why he bothered, why he wasted his _time_ on the tedious shit that bled from a starched shirt that ran dark with sweat in the office's meager air-conditioning. A fan dragged from some colonial hotel traced long whomping strokes through the sticky air, stirring and disturbing without really ever offering relief.

And Revy was tromping with her steel-plated jungle boots, grimy with the city's shit and filth, across the wide-slabbed hardwood. Flinging herself on the sofa with what Rock seriously thought might've been a flounce. The pen was leaking ink, drooling a black smear across his fingers, and it'd even stitched a few threads through his crisp dress white. Everything was just too damn  _hot_ to be troubled with this, but it was still there, wasn't it?

Dutch just sat, inscrutable, the Big Man enthroned on his stiff-backed chair, Mao's  _Little Red Book_ opened across his lap, huge hands dwarfing the thin-spined little edition that someone had printed for a  _Chinese_ 's pocket. The eyes were camouflaged behind sunglasses that he wore every day, every hour, probably didn't even slip off to sleep. Rock couldn't claim to understand it.

Dutch barely gave any inkling he'd  _heard_ Revy 'til she sprang up again.

“Hey, are you listenin', Dutch? C'mon, man-”

“I heard you, Revy. What about the airport?” It still amazed Rock a city like Roanapur _had_ an airport. Not that it didn't have need for it; there were more than a few Japanese cities that would've _needed_ an airport, an airstrip, that barely even felt the luxury in a rail line stitched through their lavish rural idyll. No.

It was the idea that anyone could pretend it had anything to do with something more than Roanapur's  _real_ commerce, the black blood that throbbed through its poisoned veins. The drugs and the guns and the needful things they called contraband that was a comfortable concession to the fantasies men sequestered in their luxuriant leather-upholstered rare-wooded manses called the real world. But there was nothing of  _that_ world in Roanapur; just reality. And that was it. What was illegal only was because it'd occurred to someone to stamp it on that sainted ledger of human misdemeanor.

But so what? Rock, hell,  _Rock_ , timid, meek, the pathetic sarariman, he could've slumped down to any of the squalid markets lettered in gaudy bold fuchsia and retina-ripping scarlet that scrawled like draconic scales or surrendered to the siren's song of the neon that splashed over sullen sun-baked avenues and as long as they'd paid the right taxes, he could have anything he  _wanted_ there.

There were the pirates, the fly-by-nighters, the simple thugs whose desperation or heady stupidity or ignorance or denial that just said  _fuck it_ to the taxes and rolled their dice and no matter how much they gave it the tat, they always ultimately came up snake-eyes, but that didn't matter.

Because for those few blissful minutes, they'd  _have it_ , delude themselves they had one over on Balalaika and Chang and even Abrego, that sneering  _Scarface_ refugee. And they wouldn't. No one did. Because that was how the power  _worked_ in the city.

But there were times, Rock knew, that people needed something  _else_ to believe in; or maybe they were like those human infernos that stalked the alleys and ripped through the place's resilient threadbare fabric, surviving only because the last few threads that stitched together its weird tapestry were made from necessity's iron, that set everything else ablaze with their contagious madness.

It happened. Often. Or at least enough that even  _he'd_ seen it, or at least heard about it, more than enough. And now even Benny's quick light footsteps had become a clattering gale, whipping around a corner and into the office.

“Dutch, you'll never believe what's happened, man-”

“I'll just hazard a guess and say it has something to do with whatever is going down at the airport.” Rock hadn't seen _that_. Dutch closing his book, mountainous shoulders rising with a long-suffering sigh like the Himalayas just shrugging off their torpor while some horrible beast dwelling in the earth stirred from millions of years of slumber. 

“Yeah, that's right.” Benny was tightening the taut elastic slapped around his hair's huge bottle-blond bouquet, clapping palms on his hips. “I guess I never get to be the guy in the know anymore.”

“I already told him, Benny. Man, this's gonna be _sweet_. The bodies are gonna start hittin' the floor _tonight_.” Revy was rejoicing. Rock knew it needed to be _something_ ugly. Let his eyes flit up from the paper. Just for a few seconds.

He still had another  _month's_ efficiency data to sift through. The word  _boring_ wasn't exactly in the immediate few light years of what was settling heavy with a horrible aggravation in his gut like when your fingers were numb and dumb and couldn't tease out a knot and your breath was  _festering_ in your lungs and you couldn't finish it but you didn't want to get up, either, 'til you felt the tension slacken.

Rock was about five seconds from just cutting the Gordian Knot and pointedly pulling the papers from the table, clutching them in a huge ink-stained sheaf, and tearing them the fuck apart. Drew another drag from the cigarette that bled its creamy smoke from his lips. When the hell had he started smoking  _that_ prolifically?

Yeah, every Japanese smoked, or at least that was the sense Rock had, but it was something as achingly artificial as the face that was Japan's faith: It was social, something for the right impression, so your boss or your client or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or  _anyone_ wouldn't be caught out, wouldn't be insecure when they needed their nicotine relief. But you couldn't really smoke at the office anymore, or at least, it was  _tackier_ to do it now. There were even streets where those adorable little signs that'd have even the timidest codger in Roanapur roaring at the modest little whisper,  _We thank you for not smoking, respected citizen_ .

Who'd obey  _that_ ? Even the most law-abiding citizen, such as that rarefied species existed in Roanapur, would've just lit up there, just on a point of principle. But he was sucking down three or four packs every day sometimes, and it wasn't  _only_ because everyone else did; sure as hell wasn't only because taxes happened to other people and the average L &M pack smuggled from who knew where, and that wasn't only an offhand remark but a simple economic reality, was about ten baht at the mom-and-pop stalls that operated with the Ripoff Church's and Triads' blessing.

So Rock smoked, and smoked, and there were times when he actually  _felt_ it again. That reeling daze that was worse than any of the grass that Benny lit up when he was drifting through that electron universe that  _spoke_ to him like the dead words of eldritch gods from his computer monitor. He always wanted Rock around whenever he hit  _anything_ that he could've thought was Japanese, and Rock was... Well, it was pathetic.

Even Rock knew it was. It wouldn't've upset Benny to just hear  _no_ sometimes, but Rock still felt obligation's sharp twang in his gut. He was the new guy; he was newest hire. He'd be out  _first_ if he really upset anyone. He could feel it. So it was his obligation to be diplomatic, to be concerned with the office's morale, and that was treating every whisper as an order, every suggestion as a command.

It was pitiful. He could taste it slathered on his tongue like bile. But Roanapur still wasn't Tokyo; wasn't an austere cold neon abyss whose walls closed around him with the train's doors' slow pneumatic wheeze. There wasn't the rush hour crush. There was no rush hour at all. The bay winked at him with a slow languorous ripple through the window sometimes when he stared through it, a perfected opal whose sweet brine sometimes even cut through the industrial chemistries and the grease's unctuous nostril-slapping smears and the gasoline's hot kiss.

He could throw open the window and  _know_ that there was a world, a real world, just outside it; it wouldn't just be knocking off at nine or ten or eleven or maybe not at all, his entire universe wrought around an artless obsessive  _busyness_ that was kissing ass 'til your jaw ached or just  _sitting_ there persuading your boss who was doing exactly that that you meant something,  _you_ merited that promotion.

It wasn't about having the Right Diploma from the Right School; it wasn't about needing to listen to Mother and Father bitch at him about having been a fucking  _ronin_ for one year,  _one year_ , and still getting into the university that was  _good enough_ . But that wasn't fucking enough for them, was it, because  _Elder Brother_ was admitted on his exam year to Todai, to the law school, and that was it. Big Brother was sainted, perfected, because he slumped into that faceless nest of penguins that called itself the bureaucracy. The government. He'd Be Somebody Someday.

And who was little Rokuro? Nobody. That was who. Asahi Heavy Industries just wasn't  _close_ enough. Even when the boom imploded into a bust and  _half_ the kids who'd graduated with him were still bumming around, groping for a job,  _any job_ , that wasn't just being a freeter or busking on street corners or slumping back home or being a gigolo for some pathetic office lady who still collected a goddamned allowance from her parents.

That didn't matter.

Here, he wasn't Rokuro. He was  _Rock_ . And as silly as it felt to him, as insane as that city was, febrile and overheated and with streets running thick with blood and perfumed with gunpowder and filth and reverberating with the dull-eyed whores' come-ons, well, he was there.

A pirate, mom and dad. He was  _their_ generation's natural produce.

Rock knew, on some visceral level, that he was something that wasn't novel but what no one wanted to admit: He was part of a disposal generation. The Japanese weren't  _supposed_ to be disposable. The Thais were, and other brown people, and black people, but the Japanese had bleached themselves white with cash and they weren't only supposed to be meaningless vapid consumers, who would eat and eat and eat until there was no more to spend, and then they would obligingly slip under debt's waters and die quietly and unobtrusively while others took their places at the trough.

He'd had a niggling in Japan.

Here? In Roanapur? He knew it; felt it claw his eyes every time he stared out across the boulevards at the dusty colonial buildings and up at the Ripoff Church's great Neo-Gothic temple of cupidity and into the hotels' façades fashioned from ugly cold glass panels that reflected the city's hungers and taunted the human detritus squatting in the slums and ghettos with fantasies that always drifted far out of reach, balanced on your palm but only because you were so far away.

“Hey, dumbass, are you listening?” Revy was talking; Rock had spaced out again, let his thoughts drift in the weird inky abyss beneath his eyes' cool black skein. He never needed to worry about it at the office at Asahi: No one expected his input unless it was in accordance with a design that was planned and seconded and validated by the higher-ups and conveyed as an artfully formulaic email a week in advance.

“Uh? S-sorry, Revy, I was just busy with the efficiency reports-”

“Do you see that, Dutch?” Damn, and now he'd pissed her off, like always. Every word; every _whisper_ ; every _thing_ he ever did. Revy's long leg snapped out with a chorus girl grace, sending a brittle wooden chair rattling against the table.

With how much she'd abused the damn thing, it still astonished Rock it hadn't just splintered into kindling.

“Revy, calm down. I asked Rock to take care of the company's resource management. That's what you did, right, Rock? Back home?” Dutch was intervening for him. Again. Rock's ambivalence roiled in his gut; it'd shut up Revy, because she'd never raise her hand at the boss, but damn if he didn't feel his stock plunging like Black Monday in her eyes.

It wasn't fair. He'd answer her candidly, and Revy's lush soft lips, he was sure they would be, would twist away from teeth that weren't  _teeth_ at all, but a feral animal's fangs, and she'd bristle and her hackles would rear up and she'd spit and snarl at him.

And then he'd be guileful and she'd do the same.

She just fucking hated him. That much was obvious. She must have regretted dragging him aboard, so why the hell  _did she do it, then?!_

Dutch, Benny,  _they_ could appreciate his worth, right? So why not Revy?

“Uh...” And Rock felt it; it was almost an ambush Dutch had lain for him.

Not just semantical. Psychic.

_Back home._

What was Back Home for Rock? It was a land mine Dutch had just flung in front of him, and he could feel every muscle twanging, straining, toe a half-inch from grazing the damn thing.

“I, uh... Back at Asahi, I was in the resource department-”

“Oh, who the fuck cares, office boy? I don't give a shit if you were giving espresso high-colonics to the big bosses. Fuckin' pussy.” Revy was just shrugging him off again. At least _that_ felt almost normal for Rock. “C'mon, Dutch, you really haven't heard?

“I even scooped Benny on this.” And now Revy was the Voice of The Streets, a cipher for the place's every squalid impulse and craving. Seemed apt, really.

“Revy, what're you getting so excited about, anyway? It's not like anybody invited _you_ to the OK Corral.” Benny was reclining now, his sails luffing with Revy's spotlight theft.

Dutch just regarded them with his opaque eyes, wondering just when and how the hell it'd ever sounded attractive to play den-mother to this group of Neanderthals, misfits, and idiots. Oh, well, it was still better than 'Nam by a damn sight, never mind the obvious argument against ever even  _trying_ to slip back into the States.

There were worse punishments than being sent to Vietnam.

And they were sure as hell more miserable than Roanapur.

“Hey, Benny, why don't you just sit and spin, okay?” Revy jerked one of her Cutlasses with a sharp stainless steel glint from a holster to punctuate that lovely little sentiment. It wasn't even menace, and that was worse than anything, Rock felt: She could just brandish the fucking thing and it was _normal_. Just something that happened.

Even worse than that, maybe _the_ worst, his gut wasn't dropping into his shorts anymore when she did it.

“All right, Revy, why don't you share with the class what's gotten you so excited?” Dutch finally just humored her. The hell else was he supposed to do?

“It's about _time_. It's gonna be big. I know it. Just wait 'til Hotel Moscow calls or- or maybe Boss Chang.” Revy was about _wetting_ herself; Rock sagely withheld _that_ chestnut. She'd reared up again, slapped her Cutlass back into its holster with a faint little sibilance in the well-oiled leather sleeve, outstretched her half-gloved hands like a cut-rate raconteur.

“It's gonna be fuckin' amazing. So, like, anyway, I was listening to the police scanner, you know, just chilling out, drinking a beer,” Rock considered himself wiser than a treeful of owls for not remarking on just how twisted it was for anyone to regard the police scanner as relaxation in a city like Roanapur, for whose savage hungry denizens homicide was just a light palate-cleaner between meals of meaty atrocity. “Anyway, suddenly, I start getting this weird traffic-”

“Revy, is this thing going anywhere?” Dutch's impatience was something Revy wouldn't challenge lightly.

“Yeah. It is. So I hear it. A fuckin' _jumbo jet_ somebody was landing at the airport.”

“Bullshit. You can't land a jumbo at that airport. At Hotel Moscow's airstrip, maybe, but-”

“That's what I'm talkin' about, Dutch. Somebody was tryin' to put down a goddamn jumbo. So I got on another channel-”

“That's what I was doing. I was talkin' to a friend in Shanghai, and then told _me_ about some jumbo jet that got 'jacked out of the airport a few hours ago.” And Revy was snapping around like a snake someone had startled in mid-meal, eyes _infernal_.

“Benny, you fuck, you really wanna die, don't you?”

“Nah, not especially, but I thought I'd just shed some light on what you were talkin' about. It left out of Shanghai awhile ago; they kept it airborne, and somehow they beat it and got into international airspace before the Chinese managed to scramble jets to get it back or shoot it down or whatever.

“And that's just _part_ of it. These guys are supposed to be hardcore terrorists or something. They shot up a Chinese general, blew up a building, and then they hijacked that flight Revy was talking about en route to Ecuador.”

“Ecuador, huh?” Dutch just regarded them, Revy splayed over the sofa now and Benny tucked onto the last cushion with what Rock would only have called _demureness_ , like a pair of hard-edged rangy cats who'd dragged a golden goose into his parlor. “Did you learn anything more about this plane, Revy?”

“Fuck, yeah. It seems like a _lotta_ nasty people are after 'em. The chinks already had a hit squad on the ground in Roanapur, probably doing whatever they're always doin' with Chang's people, and it's turnin' the place into a goddamn warzone. I talked to Eda; she said that the Ripoff Church, Jesus, what'd she say?” Rock hadn't seen Revy's smile _that_ huge for awhile.

It wasn't that Whitman Fever thing; it wasn't the cold soul-blasted savagery that animated her with a  _zest_ for cruelty and blood-spattered mayhem that adorned walls with huge clods of brain kneaded with hair and scalp and bone and loosed guts in weird plastic pulsations through broken meat.

He didn't puke when he saw it first. It was the adrenaline, he was reasonably sure. He thought. It must've been that. Just like soldiers didn't hurl when they were in their first battle, because it was a wheeling and incomprehensible parallel universe and there weren't  _words_ to capture the images, and everyone's life in polite industrial society had been broken down from the sensual and the experiential into prepackaged language, so of course you didn't understand what was happening.

But then, maybe he'd had some kind of weird spiritual experience then. He'd become habituated to all the gore and the blood and everything else. And it didn't bother him. Not any more than it bothered a butcher to see the hot red stinking of salt brine and copper slosh across the floor.

Maybe there  _was_ something wrong with him, because his attention was riveted to Revy, and it wasn't only just with the usual sense of distant silent awe he reserved for the lavish long-legged silhouette, the soft-skinned grace dusky with the implacable tropical sun that this place's antechamber-of-hell ambiance had never coarsened.

Not like her eyes, those weird cat's eyes, amber and intense.

He was entranced with all of it. He was a fucking idiot, of course, and he knew it; knew it whenever he flinched away from his own meat when he granted himself the tiniest touch animated with  _her_ , swollen and hot and with her name impotently cradled on his lips but never really  _loosed_ , consumed with that superstitious certainty that she'd know.

And she'd murder him for it. It wouldn't be that white-hot passion he'd seen, that flame that blasted up from her eyes, didn't just  _melt_ the ice but sublimated it into a scalding vapor.

It'd be languid, and deliberate, and she'd maybe even linger on it, too.

_Rock._

He'd hear her voice. Just like in that cold dead submarine, that metal sepulcher tucked quiet and secret and forgotten in the ocean's bowels.

Her voice was just so fucking _soft_ then. But that was a delusion; it was the softness that was a well-polished stone's impression against your skin, or maybe an immaculate dorodango, and it would become brittle and hard and cruel the instant you tested it.

_If you ever talk to me like that again, I'll kill you._

_If you ever... I'll kill you._

He knew she would. He'd felt her fist's wet hot crack against his jaw; he'd stood proud, firm, and bitten back the rage that he was sure had died somewhere with his dignity and been consigned to ashes in Tokyo, but he'd felt it.

She would.

He could never compete with that; could never _hope_ really to challenge or eclipse it.

“She said the Ripoff Church, _those_ fuckin' people, _**they'd**_ never even get involved with it. Chang's tryin' to stay neutral or whatever, and the Russians are deciding if they hate the slanties or just this pure chaos even more.

“But Eda told me they ripped the place to _shit_. Brought down this bigass Boeing 'cause it was at bingo fuel, and, _bang_. Ripped off the wings, almost had its big fuckin' nose into that little terminal. Sounds badass. I wish I coulda been there.

“I wanna go hunting for these guys. I heard they're tearin' up the whole goddamn town, Dutch.”

“Revy, you can count me out if you're just gonna go spectating a firefight. I've got better things to do.” There was no spell for Dutch.

If you got worked up over every bit of bedlam in Roanapur, you'd never sleep. Shit, you'd be jizzing in your pants whenever you saw someone flash their piece in the market and try to knock over one of the grizzled leather-skinned old crones who could outdraw and outshoot Annie Oakley.

“That's not what I'm talkin' about, Dutch. Think about it. Maybe somebody'll have a big fucking _bounty_ on these dudes. They shot through the chinks who were waiting for 'em. This was a big special forces team the Reds use for trouble-shooting, and they _won_.

“C'mon. Don't you think it'd be a challenge? Your six-shooter and my Cutlasses?” And now they were coming up again like a bad meal, akimbo, that sawtoothed leer tearing its wicked seam across her face. It was so fucking huge Rock always just expected it to finally circumnavigate her head, eat through her hair, and then everything would just slop off with a wet _squelch_ and whatever horror was really lurking there would expose itself as something out of a Lovecraft novel.

“Count me out, Revy. I'm busy-”

“What, readin' your Chairman Mao? Give me a break. Is this some kinda _affection_ for those chink bastards?”

“Sure, Revy. Whatever you say.” And that was Dutch's Final Word in the matter, eyes falling back to the bits of wisdom and heaps of demagoguery and slapping open the fine rice-paper pages. Benny was twisting a soft finger into one ear with a long lingering yawn wafting out of his lips.

“What about you, Benny? C'mon. Haven't _you_ ever wanted to get in on somethin' like this, show me you're not just some limp-dicked computer nerd?”

“Nah. I gotta tune up the _Lagoon_ -”

“Fuckin' pussy.” Oh, no. Those cruel animal eyes were settling on _him_. Shit. This just wasn't fucking fair at all.

Rock was already pantomiming an unwholesome and probably  _ carnal _ enthusiasm for scrutinizing the  _ Black Lagoon _ 's every  _ milliliter _ of avgas consumption.

“Rocky-baby.” And she was clomping closer, a fucking rhinoceros twisted with some warped and impure alchemy into a five-six lissome stripe of tight dark skin poured into Daisy Dukes and a crop-top that left not even imagination to the imagination. Her breasts brushed his nape; her breath settled over him, rank with stale shitty Thai beer that was _nothing_ like his beloved Sapporo's purity and cigarettes and it was still achingly sweet. A woman's breath, warm and feathery.

Shit, she was a beautiful woman, and she knew it, and Rock had...

Well, he wasn't accustomed to that.

He drank with his shithead boss at the hostess clubs; even  _ sprang _ for some of the overpriced account-emptying cocktails and the surreal spectacle in a grown-ass man cooing and draping himself on lavish surgically-perfected thighs bare or shimmering with tight fabric and not even grasping at the easy masturbatory Kabuki-Cho outlets but just...

Just  _ whining _ like a brat.

Rock had, well, he'd never  _ really _ paid for it. Not exactly. He'd thought about it. Once. Ten thousand yen fisted in his hand and breath scalding in his chest and an inarticulate anguish mantling up in his gut and the _ I'm so very sorry, but... _ Letter from Kaguya on his shitty one-room apartment's table that was  _ also _ his desk for his work  _ away _ from work, and his fingers were only an inch and an instant away from slapping at the telephone club girl's number advertised with bedroom eyes and shiny sleek black hair and tits like the  _ Hindenburg _ flowering up through tight painted-on lycra but he just...

Didn't.

He'd just dumped the yen on more beer and an advance on the next month's rent.

There were so goddamn many women that could be had for the tiniest  _ fraction _ of that in Roanapur. It disgusted him. And he still felt its ugly simpleminded twinge in his slacks when his eyes fell on their skin, bared in the swelter, embroidered with sweat in great coiling arabesques. 

And then he saw their eyes and they were portals to black ugly places he'd rather not visit but he never  _ felt that _ with Revy. It was a disgusting and obscene and loathsome crush that'd probably kill him eventually.

“Rock, how 'bout it? You wanna pop your cherry, go out on a real goddamn tiger hunt?” It was moronic.

_ He _ was a moron.

Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Fucking gutter-dwelling scum-huffing twit. But he caught Benny's  _ better-ye-than-me _ quirk of the lips and the eyes that scrawled with a lightning spurt of, well, not envy or jealousy, but at least a  _ you-dog-you _ sense of admiration for it.

“Ah, well, I... I need to finish up this paperwork, Revy.” Thank god and the whole fucking pantheon and _every_ deity ever imagined by man and imputed to phenomena natural and supernatural for paperwork. Amen and fifty baht for Jerry Falwell.

“Jesus, you fuckin' nancy. Here I was, ready to give you a chance to be a real goddamn man, and you just put your nose in those papers. Lookit these!” And Revy was snatching up one of the folios with those quick leather-encrusted fingers, clammy and warm and disorienting against _his_ , and she was just another fucking bully.

Of course she was a bully.

She wasn't the monster lurking under the bed, though. Shit, she wasn't. She was something  _ real _ . She didn't terrorize children: She was adults' fears, their  _ horrors _ , made manifest, persuaded themselves that they could just buy with the right insurance and the perfect passports and the lavish leafy neighborhoods that ineffable  _ normality _ whose door she'd kick down, the respectability she'd riddle with enough lead to open up a mine.

Rock had been easy prey for bullies in high school, in junior high, even in elementary. Shit, he remembered a girl  _ like _ Revy. In that instant. One of the girls from the neighborhoods that had always been an object of whispers he understood  _ now _ to be cruel and clannish and petty, ugly gossip about her mother, about how the little bitch must've gotten into  _ his _ elementary, the upwardly-mobile, passage from a fucking kindergarten, a preschool, that expected you to take a competitive exam in...

What was it, anyway?

Blocks?

Teddy bears?

But she was pretty and her clothes were only clean about once or twice every month and her hair fell in a huge standing column that wreathed her, coiled around her. She was already  _ years _ more adult than the other shits in his grade, forever mistaken for a junior high student, and the eyes started in the first grade anxious and timid and retiring and by the sixth grade were hardened and cold and denuded of anything like empathy.

And she'd jerk at the rich bitches' fragrant hair and she'd pluck up an exam and shred it into confetti and she'd chortle when anyone spilled out across the hall over her outstretched leg and there was something more. A private mirth that animated her into laughter that Rock got knew.

He was in on the joke now. It was Death's own; Suffering's own; celestial forces that took shape, black and ugly and horrible.

She'd advanced with him to another élite junior high, and then dropped out by the third year. It had always haunted him with cold and distant pangs, but it was never  _ his _ fault, right?

He'd seen a girl that tormented him with her likeness in Kabuki-Cho.

He was drunk.

Fuck, he was  _ shitfaced _ , falling-down, and she was there, one of the luscious beauties poured into latex staring out from a steam-and-cream and he'd just jerked away his eyes, because it  _ couldn't _ have been her, and even if it had been, what did it matter, anyway?

And maybe  _ that _ was the seed that'd been sewn and blossomed into whatever diseased fervor he held deep in his gut for Revy.

“Lookit these goddamn things. They're just _numbers_ , Rock. Heeeey, Duuuuutch.” And now Revy's voice was a flinty wicked singsong, sloshing through the room when the air-conditioning kicked in with a dull dry thrum. “You think Rocky-boy can maybe come out and play, leave his homework for later?”

Dutch didn't even bother glancing over the pages.

He wasn't impressed with her teasing, right?

Rock was a little more indispensable than that.

“Bring him home before I need those reports in.” Thank you, thank- what? And there wasn't so much a sentence as just a jumbled word curdling between Rock's ears. _Whafuck?!_ “I'm putting in the gas order tomorrow afternoon, so he's got awhile.”

“Oh, _sweet_.” And now Revy was rejoicing.

And Rock was gonna fucking die.

“C'mon, Rocky-boy. We're gonna pop that cherry.” Rock could already feel it. It really wasn't fair. He was just an office boy, after all, wasn't he? A penguin-suited drone whose greatest adventures were just _inflicted_ on him, who'd never known anything at all like heroism and, dammit, a once-in-a-lifetime-one-in-a-million shot that turned up _perfectly_ didn't mean anything.

Anything at all. The sun had already begun to slouch with a slow listlessness from its vainglorious height and Rock knew it'd be setting soon, vanishing under the mountains' ugly sprawl that would start to twinkle with the tens of thousands of drowsy pointillist lights that would just become a huge misty gash across the horizon, the few respectable neighborhoods and the shantytowns with their pirate hook-ups. There would be the neon and everything that already was, brazen and strutting and proud in the city, would just be _worse_. Worse and worse.

But he was still being dragged up.

“C'mon, Rock. Don't be such a goddamn sissy. Benny, I'm takin' the car-”

“Hey, be careful with it, Revy, okay? We just got done fixing the fucking thing after that maid blew the hell out of it-”

“Shaddup, Benny. This's gonna be _big_. I know it. I can _smell_ the dollars in this. A shitload. And you're just throwing out the money, Benny. You, too, Dutch. We could use you, y'know, boss-man?” Oh, this was just _horrible_. Rock would be alone with her.

Would feel her eyes' cold expectation on him and what the fuck would he do? Just like always, there'd be those long awkward silences and he's shrink in the bucket seats and he'd hope for an accident, a pileup, not even with the Plymouth whose huge American engine sounded like nothing more than a battle tank's, but just anything so Revy would forget he existed.

His shoes clanked down the staircase; her fingers laced around his tie, leading him along like the dog he must have been to obey her like that, without protest, without complaint. Didn't say _shit_.

“Jesus, Rock, this dorky tie. Why doncha finally wear that goddamn shirt I bought for ya?”

“Because it's during work hours-”

“You're _always_ working, then, you fucking dork. You never take that shitty shirt off. Those stupid pants. How many do you have, anyway, y'fuckin' penguin? Why don't you get a tuxedo so you can greet all our clients like some snooty maître d', you fuckin' asshole?” Well, she was _no more_ pissed off with him than she always was, flopping into the passenger's seat.

Rock could feel it. Always. Just some faint twinge snapping through his arms like pissing onto the third rail. The _need_ to open her door.

She wouldn't just jeer at the chivalry. She'd be _delighted_. Oh, she'd linger on it for days. Romeo. White Knight. Feel her grimy boots thump on his lap.

_Hey, Galahad, why doncha lick the shit off 'em for me?_

Slumped behind the wheel and twisted the chiming keys in the ignition. Felt the engine turn over once, twice, _take_ with its brutal guttural throb that coiled up through the seat and twisted the huge sleek hulk into a wheeled vibrator. If it were _that_ intense for him, what about her? He'd seen it, maybe just _intuited_ it, the faint flush that'd creep into Revy's cheeks.

“Move it, dumbass.”

“ _Where_ , Revy? We don't even know where these guys are, _who_ these guys are-”

“Eda said she'd give me the word.” Oh, _shit_.

“Ah, you don't have a cellphone-”

“I don't _need_ a goddamn cellphone, Rock. What kinda moron are you? We're gonna pick Eda _up_ , shit-for-brains.” Well, there they were. Pulling out of the Lagoon Company warehouse's lot, population _their car_ alone, wheeling onto one of the thoroughfares that definitely didn't seem to have noticed there was a running firefight slashing through the city.

Not that it would've mattered. That was just something that happened; Tuesday, or maybe Thursday. Wednesdays weren't exactly rarefied, either. A weekend without something pyrotechnic would probably be evidence of divine intervention. A weekday, too, really, especially with the Lagoon Company.

Rock definitely hadn't expected that a simple delivery service-slash-sometimes-pirates would lie at the core of some cosmic _warp_ that urged every slavering armed nutcase, grudge-nursing psychopath, and superhuman murder machine onto _their_ laps, but it must've been some sort of collective punishment for anything and everything they'd done not only in this life but at least fifty or sixty past existences.

For fuck's sake, it wasn't fair. The maid was one of the more _trivial_ altercations with the certifiable, and at least the Flag had taken her wrath's brunt. And Revy's jaw. At least she had strong teeth.

The city had been reduced to a muscle-memory nothing; the familiar boulevards, wheeling along the shores of open-air markets whose vendors crowed and bleated and just sat with a drowsy sluggish enticement in the heat that baked the aged boulevards tiled from the shit-eating carrion birds' vantage in strange and haphazard constellations of umbrella'd stalls. Vegetables and fruits from the provinces in varying ripeness and pesticide poisoning lay beside less prosaic wares; shifty-eyed shysters were the furtive touts to urge someone seeking something a little more exotic to the shithole dive bars' back rooms and the back-alley hustlers and anyone with either the juice and the license or just the simple balls to peddle their stuff in Roanapur with or without the gangsters' consent.

Pickpockets, purse-snatchers, throat-cutters, they were only another layer of the place's commerce. They weren't only ambiance. This wasn't _Casablanca_ ; Bao's wasn't really the bar at the end of the world where the pianist's fingers tinkled on an out-of-tune honkeytonk's yellowed broken keys and the women were easy but with hearts of gold and the booze was watered-down but wholesome.

This was the authentic article. The women were as heartless as everyone else, or as battered and ruined and tormented and desperate as everyone else, or hadn't quite fallen far enough really to know that this wasn't just a way station on the road to heaven or hell but one of the latter's suburbs. The heat scourged. Revy hated the air-conditioning unless it was so merciless that it still soldered your clothes to your skin like purulent wet rot doing seventy on the windswept freeway that thundered to and from the causeway and up to the Ripoff Church's campus.

“Where are we picking up Eda, Revy?” But Rock was the chauffeur today, like always. There was an inchoate sense destined never even to be given outlet as a private whisper in his hotel room's lonely confines that Revy couldn't drive.

He'd never seen her behind the wheel. Not _once_. It was either Rock or Dutch or Benny. Or maybe no one trusted someone with her temperament with their only transportation. Whatever it was, her half-gloved fingers were reserved only for _one_ bit of machinery, and that was something that needed only its own crunching explosive urgency to work. No maintenance work more intricate than just peeling off the long metal slide that cradled its barrel and swabbing out the powder that gathered in the long silvered tube.

Even _Rock_ could do it, and he sure as hell wasn't a gunman. Not that she'd ever entrust him with anything more than just smearing fistfuls of his brain and blood over the thing when he finally pissed her off far enough for the perpetual threats to be consummated.

He knew it'd happen. Eventually. And she wouldn't regret it at all. Dutch might be upset for a few days; Rock had revised their filing system, after all, and it'd take Dutch at least two or three days to master it. And Benny, well...

Benny probably would just shrug over it; at worst, there'd be a few words about not ruining the Roadrunner's upholstery with the ugly juices drooling out of his head. And Rock had almost reconciled himself with that. He was still there, after all, nosing the Plymouth's broad snout through the traffic that wasn't anything like the snarled rolling steel nightmare that curdled in Tokyo's huge avenues like fat corpuscles in a sumo wrestler's veins but more terrifying. Chief Watsap had only inherited a city that lay in a country that thrived on lawlessness.

No. That wasn't the word. That was a square's word for it. Lawlessness. It was the pretension there _was_ a real Law, something hard and absolute and tangible, chiseled with celestial lightning into holy stone, when there was only rich men's convenience. Rock knew that Eda and the Ripoff Church represented more than just a spiritual cause corrupted and twisted on its axis into something ugly and avaricious.

And he knew that it wouldn't be possible for Boss Chang and Balalaika and even the lesser goons and thugs and, well, Chief Watsap even to exist as more than just aberrations that would've been sought out and stamped on like cockroaches if a real law _did_ exist. But it didn't. So they advertised ostentatiously and lived it up in the huge slab-side towers whose twinkling panes became distant points of aspirational light for the miserable throngs huddled in the low-slung alleys and the mountain shantytowns like Rio _favelas_ and the huge _colonias_ he'd seen draping Caracas' soft lush foothills.

They were already starting to prick into the relief that became the simplicity of a child's drawing in the sticky mildewed evening air: Boxes stabbing up proud and rudimentary in their shapes through the sea mist and smog, immaculate geometries in yellow squares announcing a life that didn't need to wallow in the streets' grime.

But it was the same damn place. The one thing Rock _didn't_ do that pissed off Revy was snapping the radio to one of the local pirate stations, an independent outfit still lost somewhere near the time before Ronald Reagan surfed into the White House on a black mist of stupidity and selfishness and Rock was past being a twinge in his father's loins and before he'd meandered into high school.

“Fuckin' fuck. I hate The Eagles sometimes.” Unless they were shitting up Don Henley at a few hundred thousand watts. “I mean, okay, _Witchy Woman_ is good, but how fuckin' many times can anybody stand listenin' to goddamn _Hotel California_ before it starts to sound like Yanni?”

Rock really needed to agree; still didn't contribute an opinion. Because Revy wasn't ordering him to turn it off, either. It was one of the last verses, melted off to the Stones.

_You Can't Always Get What You Want_ .

“I fuckin' hate Don Henley sometimes. I mean, seriously, who the fuck would make a song as whiny as _Hotel California_? And then the dumbass has ta have this _huge_ to-do about how it's a big fuckin' secret.

“So what's the deal? Hell? A bad hotel in Reno?”

Rock felt the words thick in his throat, like coughing up a bad cigarette's vestiges.

_If it's hell, I definitely can relate._

He wasn't exactly livin' it up. And he still was. There was the liberation, the simple perfected freedom in it, and everything that implied. It wasn't quite Darwinian, but as near as anyone could probably reach without just huddling in a war zone where it was only the  _absolute_ tyranny in survival that dictated whether you kicked your breathing habit or not.

“Anyway, we're meetin' Eda at Pattaya's Best Noodles.” The words alone fit together as well as Auschwitz's Finest Bagels. Rock could feel the grease enamel his lips, a date with at least fifty metric tons of soap or be fucking destined to be lancing the zits that'd encrust his face the next morning, the next _week_ , like a pound of raw hamburger. “I'm not hungry; don't worry, Rock.”

Revy was impervious. Eda, too. Just another of those bits of unfairness.

“All right.” But Rock had nothing to say. And it gnawed at Revy; he could feel it, _taste_ her eyes on him. Hunched in the seat.

“What the Christ is wrong with you, Rock? Fuck, you're actin' like I'm bringin' you along at gunpoint. This could be a shitload of money for you, y'know?”

“I- I guess so. I don't really know _how_ , though, Revy. I mean, you're the shootist, right? I'm just the driver-”

“Driver always gets a percentage. 'sides, I got this for you.” And now there was something being dragged out of the Plymouth's glove box that was more a portal to a parallel universe. Rock _had_ heard its latch being jerked open when he'd just stood for a few seconds outside the carmine beast, wondering what'd happen if he just _refused_.

And then obeyed, anyway.

It was a piece.

“Revy, I-”

“Take it, dumbfuck. What's wrong with you? You don't just use your hands when you go tiger-hunting.” And the words sure as hell didn't suffuse Rock with anything like _comfort_. Tiger-hunting? Rock didn't hunt _anything_.

Still felt a guilty twinge in his gut when he felt the hook jerk into a fish's maw.

“Take it, asshole.” It was huge, heavy. Rock idled the Plymouth's wide-assed bulk outside Pattaya's, barely conscious of the grime-stippled concrete façade leering out at him, the broad-paned windows that were shot with bars' long lean iron threads.

It was too huge for him.

“Revy, I- I'm not a killer, okay? I don't shoot people.” Rock cleaved to _that_. Obsessively. It was one talisman for his only kernel of faith. Rock wasn't a killer. He associated with them, profited, he knew, from Revy's and Dutch's facile homicide, but so did Benny, and _his_ hands never dirtied themselves with a gun.

But, then again, Benny had a rarefied talent, something nurtured in key-rattling labor and toil in rooms chilled so steeply that crystals gathered in the breath misting from your lips and Rock was... Well, a glorified filing clerk.

Negotiator, fine, but Dutch was able with that, and Rock always had some faint niggling sense that he was less an essential part of the operation and more an adorable mascot in his shirtsleeves and tie and slacks and dress shoes. Maybe a convenience for the languages that flung themselves with an ease that always belied his tongue-tied ineptitude with Revy and, well, with anyone with two X chromosomes, but that was probably it.

The pistol still settled on his lap, pungent with oil.

“I fixed it up myself, you ungrateful fuck. What? You gonna refuse a gift from me? You too good for that?” Jesus, he'd _really_ pissed her off now. 

He recognized it. The eyes' cold luster in the flat orange sunset that slanted through the half-opened windows. A tuktuk puttered with a flatulent hot rattle beside them. Rock would rather be the bastard with the teeth stained black with betel and a complexion like ragged leather hustling every fucking day for a pittance, for survival's simple rudiments, than himself at that instant.

“Do you even know what that is, Rock, you pussy?” And the abuse was destined _not_ to stop. It was diluvian, wasn't it?

God was about to speak, to announce that  _this_ was his punishment for every sin. Of commission and omission and simple idiocy.

He must've done something.

Rock wasn't religious. But if he'd been close to anything, it was superstitious; it was a sense of persecution, the simple maybe sophomoric belief,  _conviction_ , that if there  _had_ been a god, well, god was there just to make his life a world of shit. He was knee-deep in it.

Revy was there to make him eat his way out of it.

“Uh, it's a gun-”

“A fuckin' _gun_.” Revy's was a _bray_ now. He hated it. Fucking _hated_ it. Felt it settle venomous in his gut like shotgunning arsenic soda with enough cyanide-laced scotch to heave him through death and back into life. “A fuckin' _gun_ , y'say, Rock?

“Jesus, you'd better get _Jane's_ on the line, Rock. They need that expertise-”

“What do you expect from me, Revy? It's a gun, right? You shoot people with it-”

“Well, _you_? I'm sure you'd probably just blast your goddamn cock off with it. But, hell, _maybe_ you could try. Pick it up, dumbass. You need to _hold_ one to use one, unless you're gonna go all _Carrie_ on me, Rock.

“Is that it?”

If only he could.

That would just be  _another_ layer of weird to slop onto the city's muddled strata of ugly, though. Would it even matter? There was already a seething nest of the supernaturally horrible. Why not just the supernatural?

Rock's fingers slid close, along a thigh; it was just  _there_ .

“Oh, it won't bitecha, dumbass.” He could shoot her.

He knew that. At that instant. She was... She was his  _tormentor_ . He must have deserved it. But then again, did  _any_ of this city's victims really merit it? Any of the wretched eight-year-old whores the madames and pimps slathered with makeup and slapped into groaning vinyl skirts and stilettos that warped their unset bones and accentuated skeletal legs and bee-sting chests that were absolutely nothing, well, what had they done?

And the bastards that fed themselves on the largesse, on the excess, did they deserve  _their_ joy?

“I know that, Revy. I just... I'm not the _gun_ type, I guess. I mean, Dutch told me once that if bullets were like my words, they'd ricochet back at me.” And it was true. Rock finally still set his fingers on it. The steel wasn't cold like he'd imagined; wasn't scalding, either.

It was clammy. Plumed with a hard-edged stink of tepid metal like blood.

“Where did you find this, anyway?”

“From Praiyachat.” She'd bought it.

“I mean, aren't these really expensive?” That was it. Why not accentuate _that_ for Revy? Tell her that she'd just _wasted_ her money. Precious money. On _this_.

“Yeah, it was kinda pricey. But that's okay. You threw that G3 I gave you off the boat like it was nothin', tried to huck it at that Hind.” Shit. That was true. “You just gonna stroke it like you're givin' it a handjob?

“Hey, maybe _that's_ how you could contribute around here, Rock. Stroke off guys for, I dunno, how good are those soft little hands?” She'd snatched them up in an instant; it wasn't _lightning_. That was moronic. Lightning always felt like something slow and rolled with the thunder through his ears; he barely even noticed the quick flash.

It was a cobra snapping from thick tangled foliage.

The hunter knew it was there, but only in the broadest sense of it; the awareness that there  _were_ cobras, that they huddled there, lurking and dreadful with tongues slashing out to taste the air, stalking the hot spoor that poured through the jungle.

And Rock knew that Revy  _had_ hands; those two wicked hands.

Fingers wrenched around his wrists.

“You fuckin' _pussy_. Look at these hands. These aren't a _workman's_ hands. These're a goddamn hooker's hands. That's what you'd do best, right? Work on your back?” Revy speared him with long fine fingers swept with rasping calluses that announced the pistols' sinuous shapes in negative. They were still sleek; as lusciously oiled as every other inch of her skin.

Perfect, tight, achingly beautiful.

Her chest flared up through the sweat-darkened crop top. Those tits that just seemed  _too_ huge for anyone with that lean sharply-chiseled athleticism. But even the face was a confluence of the brute and china-doll grace. Her eyes were larger than any Chinese woman's he'd ever seen; sure as hell huger than that dragon lady's in gold-brocaded scarlet silk stalking out of a jerkoff fantasy perfumed with nikuman and cheap jiugui.

They were soft.

She'd brushed him.

Plump like gelatin.

“Look at these _hands_ , Rock. Jesus Christ, you'd think you'd never even done a day's work in your whole fuckin' life. And these sweet. Little. Fingers.” Plucking, stroking at them. He was getting hard. Fuck. He was getting hard. He knew it, too. Felt it prick up like a slumbering weasel, straining with a fang-gnashing hungry insanity numb to reality and just fucking _dumb_. Clamoring for her.

His fantasies supplied it. It was never gentle.

Even in that malleable private universe pungent with the street's heavy hot wash flooding over his bare skin or the air-conditioner's cool secret whispers, half-wasted from another evening at the Flag, Revy with an arm draped lazily over his shoulder and her tits brushing him or steeped in sweat that slathered itself so thick in the tropical swelter it crusted white on his clothes or just... Just from a tedious afternoon at the office, even then, even when it could have been  _anything_ , as indifferent to reality as watching CNN, fuck, it was still her.

It was still  _Revy_ . Hammering down the door.

_All right, lissen up, you little shit._

_Rock._

_You fuckin' asshole._

_Dumbass._

_Just lie back. We're gonna do it **my**. Fuckin'. Way._

Maybe he  _was_ a masochist. It would've made a great deal more sense than deluding himself it was some affection for who Revy was, right? Clattering in on her boots and stepping out of them and planting a bare sole on his chest and knowing the quick liquid poetry in those Daisy Duke cutoffs plunging from her shapely hips. Knowing the dark place between her thighs.

He'd be ridden. She'd drape him with a condom, and... Fuck, even in his  _fantasies_ , she made him wear a rubber. Because he'd be pleading for her to let him in her raw. And she wouldn't. She'd be animal, less Lady Godiva and more Tomoe Gozen, and her nails trimmed short would still be talons ripping into his chest.

It wouldn't mean  _shit_ to her when or even if he came.

It would be scalding, laced around him, a crunching kneading pulsation and he'd need to worry about the world's most exotic traumatic amputation.

“Why're you gettin' that dumbass faraway look on your face, Rock?” And now there was her voice. A lead sledgehammer into his prefrontal lobe.

“It's- it's nothing, Revy.” And now he was just sulking like a fucking brat.

“Yeah, I'm sure. Pick it up, Rock. Pick it up.” His hands _dragged_ down to his lap. “Pick up the goddamn piece; I'm not talkin' about your cock, either. Goddamn Japanese. It's probably like a five-year-old's, right?

“I could be lookin' at it and I probably wouldn't even notice.”

“Yeah, sure, Revy.” What the hell else could he say? Protest it? Whip it out and brandish that thing to a woman that, well... There were suspicions. The liquor-loosened mutterings, lubricated with something almost like intimacy or maybe trust. That would be enough. She wouldn't be content with the Cutlasses.

That was cold, clinical, a languid act as distant and abstracted from the soul as swatting a fly.

Her fingers would dimple his neck. And he'd know he'd strain, and heave every  _muscle_ 's every fucking fiber into it, and it wouldn't matter. Breath would poison his own lungs while he suffocated in it.

“See? Just like a real goddamn gunslinger. Jesus Christ, getcher fuckin' finger outta the trigger guard, asshole! It's loaded.” It probably was; Rock could feel it. It was heavy. And not _that_ heavy. Fantasy had always supplied some sort of spiritual burden that bled into the metal.

But it was probably three pounds.

“Uh- right. Sorry.”

“Lookit how _I_ carry _my_ Cutlasses, okay?” And one snapped out into her right hand; less drawn and more just _levitated_ into her grasp. A finger lay along the fine silver ring curtaining the trigger's cold smile. “See? You don't put your finger in the trigger guard 'til you _want_ to shoot.

“Or are you gettin' the itch already?” Revy was regarding him now with those brutal amber wolf's eyes.

She was a wolf, wasn't she?

She wasn't just a rabid stray dog. Yeah, she belonged to a pack, but so did wolves. It was a simple mistake, right? Anyone could just see the tail's velvet thrash and the slinking loping gait and tell themselves, Ah, it's a husky.

She wasn't a husky. Because she was longer, rangier,  _stronger_ . The ears pricked firmer and the tail didn't rise to waggle like an idiot. She wasn't domesticated. Rock was, well, he was sure he'd be something like a miniature dachshund.

“No. I... Like this?” It was awkward, though. As well as the gun sat in his hand, it was still just unnatural. Grafting Dracula fangs onto a vegan.

“Yeah. It's one'a the best pistols ever made. The Colt .45.”

“Oh. I guess it is.” It was one Rock _vaguely_ recognized. He knew Revy's Beretta M92FS as well as his own mother's face now.

He'd seen it more often than the latter, anyway.

“Yeah. It's only got seven in the mag, but that's fine. If you need more than seven rounds, you're either fucked or you're the world's worst shot. Only real gunslingers need a high-capacity piece like _this_.” They were a ridiculous pair. A dachshund and a wolf, comparing canines. And he could still see it.

Ultimately, through blood's corruption, nature subordinated and battered and beaten and twisted and reforged into something orderly and conceived to cleave to humanity's convenience, a dog was  _still_ a wolf. A dachshund and a gray wolf were only about thirty thousand years apart.

So were Rock and Revy, ultimately. If time's subjectivity could condense about a year into five minutes, what Revy must have suffered in her life made that sound almost conservative.

“Lookit that. That's good. That's good.” Rock just _held_ it. “ _Don't_ let your hands go soft if you hafta shoot it, or it'll jam on you. Good.” Firmer; felt the coarse wood and clammy metal against his skin.

“Revy, I- I don't want to use this thing-”

“Good, 'cause you'd be fuckin' useless. I gave it to you to use as a goddamn _backup_. Don't you dare try to use that thing unless someone's threatening you. Got it?” Rock would've adored deluding himself it was concern. It wasn't. “I don't wanna need to drag your ugly carcass home, or pay for the cleaner to chop it up.

“Don't fuck up, Rock. Where the hell's that cunt, anyway?”

“Hey, _Rocky-Baby_.” Rock felt it; the breath's hot coruscation along an ear. It was Eda. The sister from the Ripoff Church. Well, _Sister_ , even if their operation seemed about as kosher as a bagel with mayonnaise and bacon with a glass of milk. Lean arms slipped through the window, draping herself onto him, announced with those cool Aryan eyes tucked behind sunglasses like ragged fuchsia chips.

Revy's scent was sweat, gunsmoke, and engine grease.

Eda's was fragrant blonde hair and icy mint. And still that ineffable essence of violence that set around them and would probably curdle milk in a mother's breast.

The smile was a vicious wry slash.

“You still pallin' around with this shemale? Why doncha find a real lady? Just kick Two Hands out and we can head over someplace to really _baptize_ this sweet ride ya got-”

“Jesus Christ, Eda. Watch your language in front of the kid, huh? Ain't you ever afraid god's gonna strike your big slutty ass down for acting like that in that penguin costume?”

“Nah. I'm all right with the big man upstairs.” Eda was piling in, rearing up again between them with one of the vast breasts that Rock's imagination could only portray as twinned Mount Everests in aspic brushing his right shoulder.

Her voice was hot in his ear.

“Hey, honey, the offer still stands. This thing's a real pussymobile. It ain't right to just let it rot with her dry sandy cunt-”

“Fuck you, bitch. What'd you learn about this thing that went down at the airport?” Revy was _sulking_. That was their relationship.

No real venom. Just enough aspersions against each other's character, parentage, and genitalia to turn a stevedore to the priesthood.

“Oh, the two nuts from Shanghai? The Ripoff Church doesn't want to touch it, of course. Too tenuous as it is with Hotel Moscow and Boss Chang. But _I've_ got the dispensation from the Top Penguin, if you get my drift.

“And a higher power.”

“What? Jesus has an angle on this? Gimme a break.” Revy's laughter was a hot crack, kicked up like a blast of mortar fire from her throat. “C'mon, Eda, are you goin' senile or somethin' in your old age? Or is it just the inbreeding?”

“Fuck you, Two Hands. I'm talkin' about somebody more powerful than just the Good Shepherd. They're kinda interested in seeing these two Good Samaritans get out of Roanapur alive. Besides, I've got it on good authority that the only bounty Boss Chang is payin' for these fine losers is in lead.

“He's getting the screws put to him by the people with connections to _big_ Party bosses on the mainland.”

“Holy _Christ_. You're serious? Who are these dudes?” As per usual, Rock was just the bystander to their scheming. It came fast, flitting back and forth like badminton played in a five-foot court by coked-up spider monkeys. “C'mon, Eda, Spill it-”

“I dunno _really_. They're supposed to be _dead_ , as far as my, ah, good friends upstairs know.” Even Rock knew enough to suspect who Eda's _good friends_ really were. The enigmatic, uh, _quiet_ American and her association with an operation that was just incidentally the only independent outfit that hadn't been muscled out of its prestige straddling the region's major smuggling routes meant only one possibility.

Well, two, but Rock definitely didn't suspect Eda had ever taken her vows anywhere but maybe on a drunken weekend at Las Vegas.

“Oh, _shit_. This's gonna be good. So, like, is there a bounty? Any kinda bounty? I'm just _itchin'_ to tangle with these guys.” Revy was slavering over the blood.

As usual.

“Are you retarded or something, Two Hands?” And Eda was just snapping back with that slow long-suffering sigh. “I told you people want them _out_ of Roanapur. Alive-”

“And people want 'em dead. You're serious-”

“I'm serious. Boss Chang's people aren't _paying_. They just expect it as a common goddamn courtesy. Fucking Chinese. You know how they are. It's almost enough to make me think maybe ol' Fry Face might want to fuck around with him, but I think they're playing _M Butterfly_ again, so that's probably out.

“Besides, it's not like the russkies have much love for what anybody else wants unless they're Red and _loaded_. These losers are pure anarchy. I don't think we hafta worry about tussling with the _desantniki_ unless they _really_ start tearing shit up, which is where we come in.

“I _do_ know Fry Face has a little arrangement with _my_ people to be the bagmen for a pretty tasty reward if we get 'em out.”

“Let's go, then!” Revy only need to hear the word _reward_.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, it's not that simple. There's a chink hit-squad already after these guys, Two Hands. Remember?” Rock sure as hell remembered. And Revy's enthusiasm wasn't just undampened. It was inflamed.

“The fuck'd you bring me the info for unless you wanted to try it?”

“I _do_ wanna try it. You people'll be perfect. Will Dutch give these guys a way out?”

“Yeah, if ya pay him, anyway. Damn. And here I thought it'd just be an easy bounty. Bang, boom, and we get to keep the whole load. Now we gotta cut the _company_ in.” It was almost a relief for Rock. Almost. It meant at least it wouldn't be a hit.

“Well, the money's good, Revy. _Real_ good.”

“How good? This sucks, by the way. I mean, if these dudes were good enough to shoot their way outta the airport, make their way _alive_ through this city after they crashed a goddamn _jumbo_ -”

“That ain't the half of it, Two Hands. Honestly? I'd be pretty scared to try. I heard they tore Shanghai to shit. Wasted a triad boss and his private army _and_ enough of the PLA to make it a stretch to meet their Adidas quota this year.”

“Hah. I'm just quakin'. So they shot up some underfed chinamen who probably couldn't hit the broad side of a goddamn barn if they were standing _in_ the fuckin' thing. I'd wanna try. Where do we go?”

“I've got the scanner tuned into the chinks' freqs.” Eda brandished it like magic, prestidigitation snapping it from her habit's jumbled black folds. It spat up sharp chiming Mandarin in a flat seethe.

“Uh, what's that gonna do, Eda? You speak chink?”

“Yeah, I speak Chinese. What? Y'think they only brought me out here for my sterling personality and big tits?”

“I just figured they dumped your syphilitic ass out here to retire, cunt. Where are they?”

“Down near the Phong-Sap Market. I figure they'll lose these goons in the stalls, maybe try to go to ground.”

“What do these guys _look_ like, anyway, Eda?” Rock had already shifted into gear, already foreseeing the abuse that'd settle on him akimbo if he didn't have the thing rolling by the time it occurred to them that he _should_ be.

“Old guys. In their forties, I'd guess; maybe pushing fifty-”

“You're serious? Old farts? Jesus Christ, Eda.” Revy was guffawing over that while Rock needled the Plymouth onto the route that'd take them to Phong-Sap, engine reedy and high in low gear, shifting up patiently like Benny had shown him. “ _Fifty_? Where're we gonna take these assholes? Miami? How 'bout Tampa?

“I hear there're some _great_ nursing homes down there-”

“Who fuckin' knows.” Eda must have known. Rock also knew it would've been the century's understatement to say that Eda only played things close to the vest. There _was_ no vest; there was nothing but that abyss of a habit from which she dragged up everything from the sleek anthracite pistol that she snapped around with Revy's quick murderous finesse to the cigarettes that pricked in soft burnished points of light from her lips to the card she'd slipped him one evening just to piss off Revy.

And he still had the card.

_Sister Eda, Angel of Mercy_ .

Shit.

“Yeah, right, Eda, ya fuckin' cunt. What're you tryin' to hold back _now_? I swear to _god_ , if this's another shitty double-dealing-”

“You know I double-deal by _default_ , Two Hands. Just how the business works.” Eda was sparking a cigarette now, swift easy legerdemain that swapped the hard-pack Marlboros for a bronze lighter coughing up a slow flame that he'd always admired sway like a belly dancer's hips. “Anyway, these two guys, they're old.

“White. They're both Americans. Far as I know, one of 'em probably speaks a little Chinese, and that's it; the other one mostly did his work in Latin America.” Revy said nothing. It wasn't that surreal; Rock caught a glimpse of the eyes' cold meditation.

Revy wasn't stupid.

That was the misfortunate delusion that more than a few men and women had entertained, only to find themselves not even sorely disappointed so much as knowing and feeling and thinking nothing at all when they were consigned to an eternal slumber under the topsoil. Revy wasn't stupid at all. She probably had a higher IQ than he did. She could mystify him, everyone, with sudden snaps of insight; even poignant morsels of a ragged street poetry that defied his hopes of eloquence.

She was rough-hewn. That was her truth. Probably had never finished high school, at the most. Rock didn't pry, because that was an act of intrusion that he'd never survive.

“How long ago, anyway, Eda? These guys are in practice?” Revy maybe _knew_ something.

“Yeah. Pretty recently.”

“Why're _your_ people so goddamn interested? Is this some kinda grudge?”

“No. Nothing like that. I don't have any idea.” Eda had fallen between them, arms laced around the seats, dipping deep. “But I can tell ya the money's gonna be _good_.” Rock definitely saw the wicked glint that almost twanged in Eda's wintry eyes. “I mean _six-figure_ good-”

“Christ, just for bailin' out these two losers? Who are they??”

“Adam Marcus and James Lynch.”

“Fuck. Adam _what_ and James _what_? The fuck do those names mean? I mean, _who are they_?” Revy was snapping back at Eda. But it was strange; Rock couldn't quite shake off the thick greasy _suspicion_ that Revy had some idea who they were.

“That's for you to find out if we get these guys. We just need the names. Here. Here's some _recent_ photos of 'em-”

“So you _did_ have pictures? Fuckin' cunt.” They were dredged up, a pair of mugshots; Rock chanced a glance at them when he hit a stoplight. The day's receding wan light cradled them in a maudlin saffron glow; Rock read _California Department of Corrections_ on both of them.

They were... Ugly. Almost blindingly, charismatically hideous. Refugees from Hugo's Court of Miracles. A scar like the geologic wound its serpentine peregrinations down one of the men's face from the hairline to his jaw, somehow not obliterating the right eye; the nose was a boxer's, broken probably twice or thrice; brutal brows and a cold dark stare. The other was worse, not even with the dignity to be  _bald_ but with a vast dirty lank fall spilling down from his ears to brush his vomit-orange jumpsuit's shoulders, leering out of coke-bottle glasses and with a goatee and mustache like freak foliage. The scalp's bald dome captured the camera's flash, scattering it in a spray of oily light.

“Jesus Christ, these are some Miss America candidates, huh, Eda?” Revy definitely had _that_.

“I didn't say anybody wanted 'em for a modeling shoot. They're brutal guys-”

“I can see that. Yeah. One of 'em looks a little familiar, honestly.” It didn't really astonish Rock. Would've really amazed him if she'd had _no_ idea after the pensive look that'd curtained her candid face.

“Seriously? Jesus, you musta run in some weird circles, Two Hands. This guy, Adam? He was a serious merc or something back in the States.”

“Yeah. I had that idea. A real asshole, if he's the guy I remember.”

“Bad date?” Eda just couldn't resist it, could she?

“Fuck you, Eda. Like I'd even _kick_ a fuck this ugly, much less date him. Here's your pinups back, _Sister_.” And then Rock _heard_ it. No need for anything as intricate as a search. It was pyrotechnic echolocation.

“Well, shit, sounds like the chinks found 'em first. I was hoping we could just get in, get out, and not need to worry. I hope we don't need to go up against any of Chang's fuckers. I need to work in this city-”

“Don't worry, Eda. Chang's a pragmatic guy.” Rock just couldn't drag back the words quickly enough. It wasn't even the sneer, the shit-eating delight in bullying him, it'd invite from Revy. It was the guilt.

Rock wasn't  _supposed_ to breathe this shithole's politics.

And now Revy's laughter blasted up.

“Well, listen to the street's own McLaughlin. Gonna treat us to some more'a your insights, Rocky-boy?” And there it was.

“Oh, give him a chance, Revy. At least you don't need a proctologist to hear what he says.” Eda wasn't defending him; he was just a rapier to jam into Revy's gut.

“Fuck you, cunt-”

“Y'know, you woulda _killed_ on my forensics team with that razor-sharp wit, Revy. Anyway, what's your reasoning, Rock? C'mon. Tell us, baby.” Dripping. Sticky. Honeyed. It was a tribute to Eda and Revy that while the roaring engine bore them into a firefight, _that_ bitchy jovial bullshit was the priority.

“Well, think about it. Boss Chang needs to do business in this city. Why would he imperil any of _his_ men in a firefight with these two maniacs if it's only about serving the Communist Party? They might have good relations with the Triads, but it's not like it's _their_ town.

“And that's what matters most, isn't it? It's about local power, isn't it, Eda? Revy? And wouldn't Boss Chang resent needing to obey the men in Shanghai or Beijing or wherever these orders are coming from?

“I've read that the people in Hong Kong are just barely on speaking terms with their associates on the mainland.”

“Well, listen to that. He's a real sage, huh, Revy?” Rock could feel his shoulders weighted with lead. It wasn't exactly steeped in admiration. “I guess your interpretation might be right, Rock. But it could be wrong, too.

“You've forgotten that, in Roanapur as everywhere else, money. Buys. Everything. The Triad are trying to finish this thing _internally_. There might not be an open bounty on these freaks, _buuuut_...” Eda's eyes flashed with Revy's own predatory glint in the mirror. 

“ _Who knows how much cash they might've offered the Triad_ that finishes the job, dumbass.” Revy finished Eda's achingly cruel sentence.

“That's right. Oh, well, we'll find out soon. C'mon. It's not like we can just hold up a sign like we're at the airport. You stay in the car, Rock, and keep her revved up. Revy and I'll move in if we need to.” The market was a confusion of stalls, draped with wares that'd fallen off the back of cargo ships and then probably been packed onto trucks and fallen off of those and been picked up and fallen off the back of smaller trucks. Hucksters hustled and everything wasn't just hot but almost incendiary, tossed from vendor to buyer and sometimes back again.

Gunfire wasn't exactly a rarefied phenomenon there, but there was a difference. Rock could already see it. It was a fucking stampede.

“Shit! Motherfucker! It's that goddamn maid again, ain't it?!” A swarthy fiftysomething guy Rock had bought a heap of half-rotten mangoes from once was cowering under his stall, produce unmolested in their septic mounds in a shopping cart surmounted with a ratty beach umbrella whose shaft was half-rusted and whose porous canopy had faded to a smear of hues like menstrual blood spattered on old parchment.

“Wait here, Rock. We'll go out and get 'em.” Of course Rock'd be waiting there. What the hell _else_ did he do?

Was it relief that he was absolutely useless, or was there even the tiniest glint of regret in it? Why couldn't  _he_ have any meaning at all to them?

“No.” Rock was an idiot. He knew it. Fingers groaned on the skeletal wheel.

“No? Jesus Christ, what're you talkin' about, dumb fuck-”

“I mean, Revy, that it'd be stupid to just rush in on foot. Look, all right? There's a long corridor down the center of the marketplace; it's more than wide enough for the car.” And it was true. The truck path could accommodate a semi; their arms outstretched from the Plymouth's windows couldn't even graze the wheeled stalls that gathered in their endlessly vacillating archipelago.

“Huh. Guess you gotta point. You sure you're up for it, Rock?” Eda's silence was something studied; he knew _she_ had as much faith in him, _real_ faith, much less his resolve, his wherewithal, probably his bladder control, as she had in a brain-damaged kitten. Revy was already snapping out a Cutlass. 

It was conviction. Certainty. The slide was jerked back with the slow patient  _snick_ that immaculately oiled and beloved metal could generate while it caressed its own kin. It was a brass check, graceful and restrained. Revy never carried them unloaded.

It was muscle memory; the eyes flitted down and were up again.

A smile like greased venom coiled over lips that shone almost black in the shadow that huddled thick and clinging in the dying sunlight. It was perfect. Sunset; not high noon.

“Well, Eda? Wanna get out-”

“Hey, I'm already here, Two Hands. 'sides, I've been waiting for a chance to practice my moving gunnery. Just like Wyatt Earp, right, Revy? 'cept _our_ mount's got a little more horsepower than just some stallion.”

“Hey, Rock, she thinks you're not a gelding.” Rock couldn't really muster up much laughter for it; it definitely wasn't because it was the usual jab at his masculinity. He was insane. He'd die. This wasn't the movies. This wasn't a television show people called grimy and hard-boiled because they lived naïve sheltered lives and they could seriously delude themselves that a few squibs and the hot kiss of flashpowder was real violence.

Fuck, he was gonna die.

But that was...

He felt it.

Swallowed back a long breath and couldn't resist the simple need to drag a cigarette between his lips. Who fucking  _cared_ if he'd feel cancer's ineluctable rot scrawl through his lungs, take him down slowly, ploddingly, a beast whose strength lies in its prey's own body tearing with a patient ease through its cells, shredding those fragile tissues?

He'd be dead in ten minutes, one of those ugly bloated heaps of meat that suddenly stopped having any meaning at all to anyone except as an inconvenience, a patchwork of ravaged flesh still weeping sticky threads of lifeless juices with only the veins' lingering pressure. He was sure of it.

“Hey, Rock.” Revy's hand was outstretched. Her lighter clattered open, a hot rasp; her thumb caressed the callused stone and coaxed a slow slithering kiss of fire from the wick like a conjurer's trick.

He said nothing.

And she said nothing.

“Turn up the radio. I always wanted to ride into battle like that scene in _Apocalypse Now_.” Rock obliged her, sucking a huge draw of the cheap tobacco that became a cheap coil of poisons into his lungs. He was gonna taste worse in a few seconds, anyway. 

Eda was perfectly silent, the lissome nine she always carried suddenly about as worthy for her, for  _this_ , as a bikini for a white tie ball. But what the hell else did she have? There was absolutely  _no_ fucking time whatsoever. So there was only bluster, like always. If you didn't have it, you faked it with a bravado that'd seen her through not quite everything but  _enough_ that she'd almost be relieved to slough off Edith Blackwater's identity like a snake's pitted moulting husk, toss her into a burn bin and see the smoke carry off the acrid ink and paper into paradise and watch the ashes float off like angels' feathers.

She was probably going to die, of course. Because she heard it, the Chinese security goons' heavy weapons. Sub-guns' shrill burp and assault rifles' heavier bark and even the deep stilted roar throbbing from more than a few shotguns. Revy's smile was authentic, though; Eda couldn't ever gin herself into  _that_ . It was a colder abstraction, a clarity that she imposed on every nerve, inflicted on every sense, because it could  _only_ be that for her.

Revy was a feral beast, rejoicing in mayhem and slaughter, and the adrenaline that would've devastated anyone else had been mastered, every day in a life that walked a path paved in blood and bodies and consciously without regret, and she could mantle it, surf it like a wicked black wave. She didn't wallow in it like some, like even Eda did, even with paramilitary training and the reality that's nothing like even the miscreant DIs jovially cramming their boot in your gut just  _because_ and expecting you not just to like it but love it and plead for seconds. Violence for most people was an incomprehensible thing; even if they weren't just bystanders, they were still just its victims, sucked into a warp that would drag them deep into an ocean whose lead waters crushed you, whose denizens swam freely with faces from primeval horrors.

But Revy, Revy  _soared_ over it. Eda didn't envy her. She knew just what it took to nurture that, and as far as she was concerned, the compromises and the sacrifices weren't worth it. She'd cling to her clarity, to the distance that made this a faraway abstraction, like watching the votives burn down at your own funeral.

Rock wasn't shitting himself, because this was just something that happened. He'd thought maybe there was some hereditary poison that throbbed through his veins. There were the family traditions; even great-great-great- _whatever_ -grandfather's sword, an authentic  _katana_ for which his parents even had the right paperwork, a lethally edged flourish of cold steel waves that his brother brandished for his  _iaidō_ . Maybe his brother was fine with  _iaidō_ , but Rock also knew that one of his great-uncles had fought in China.

Hadn't come back, either, a mortifying blank in the family albums, a humiliating whisper of a perfectly upright bourgeois family's ugly tether to something best forgotten, cast out of the blood. But nothing ever vanished from the blood. He felt it. The blood crested every sense. Obliterated everything.

And Revy, well, Revy  _was_ . It wasn't even consciously Taoist, but  _wuwei_ 's essence had been internalized, sucked down with the gutter mud's stink and blood's rich fetid fug of stale seawater and fear and cold iron. The smile was something forged from reality's impossible fabrics, a spiritual negative that filigreed itself slowly and patiently through her until the wish that she could taste the smile becoming real, no longer just a put-on from a sneering street punk who still ploddingly wept herself to sleep.

Rock  _smelled_ it, wafting from her. Sweat and violence and gunpowder and the Cutlasses' oil. So his fingers cranked up the radio. Philosophy was something that died a quick and easy death in reality. Wealthy Frenchmen could yammer about it for hours nestled in their charming little studies tucked into serene leafy manses, but this was the truth.

People did battle not for the ideals that arrogant men and women ascribed to it but because they were killers, because that was simply what they were. Necessity, a mentally cracked desire, a soul-dead lust for the one lingering sensation that could still be wrung out of the body, well, none of these things mattered, either. War, and this was war, consecrated with the right papers or not, was a void. It had no beginning, and no end, a ring mankind had felt their way around since before the first ape even had the strange twinge to walk upright.

So that was it. The music was heavy, hammering, _hard_. It was a fuckin' Stones marathon, and who cared? Sure, most of their music was crap, but that was almost _any_ band. A fine enough ambiance for their deaths.

Rock didn't bother flooring it; it was quick, graceful, Eda craning out of the left back and Revy from the right front, and there wasn't the time to steel himself for the shots' deafening high cracks. It was obvious where they lay in the market. Smoke had already started to scud across the midget horizon the market made from the confluences of thousands of livelihoods that meant nothing, a ghost people in paper hats populating a fantasy town where nothing was real and reality stopped having any meaning at all, where you could suck down a beer that wasn't there while you lingered on noodles pungent with grease and galangal and ginger that didn't really exist and you could even buy and sell humans that no one had ever thought to give _actuality's_ stamp.

And so Rock was already swerving through their lives, because that was how it was. Because someone somewhere in a city overlooking a swamp thousands and thousands of miles away from them, a dirty city like any other that paid to keep its monuments clean, had decided that these two men who were just a rationale for this new explosion of life-ripping violence warranted a reward. And Rock was another bounty hunter, like all the others; he was another greedy motherfucker, like all the others.

Because, well, everyone was. You could tell yourself you weren't, that you gave to the right charities, that you paid your taxes without complaining, that you voted for the right people, and you held all the perfect values, but at the day's end, you were just another of the hypocrites, living not only while other people died but killing them quietly and insouciantly _with_ your life. Revy was just someone who pulled a trigger. Who put the bullets in her gun, and the gun in her hand, and that evil in her mind? No one wanted to answer those questions.

The Plymouth's oversized bulk swayed; tires screeched. The fucking thing was low-slung and sleek and almost four thousand pounds and with a 440 engine, goddammit, it _howled_ now, almost rising over the gunfire. Almost.

“There. They're there; on the right, three o'clock.” Revy and Eda spoke war's incantations, because, as disparate as their lives had been, they still came from the same nest. Revy's voice had grown deliberate, almost, almost, _almost_ cold, but not quite. Not like Dutch's near-monotone when shit had not just hit the fan but snapped off with a wet spatter and anointed everything in shades of coprolite. Eda was feeling it.

Juiced up on adrenaline that she'd always _struggled_ to choke down. Rock's cigarette had been reduced to a stub, and he still just sucked on it, a child with a pacifier. Shit, shit, shit, he was gonna fucking _die_ , and he wasn't even thirty.

Wasn't that still older than at least a few of his high school classmates who'd offed themselves when reality's futility announced itself, a terminal necktie twisted around the indispensable arteries and trachea or a razor's hot kiss on the veins or even a black-market gun, well, if I'm gonna die, why not break a few laws while I do it?

They were silent and desperate and unobtrusively _Japanese_ deaths. And the Roadrunner was _not_ Japanese. And Rock, shit, was _he_ even Japanese anymore? What did it even _matter_ now?

“Oh, fuck, _yeah_!” And now it had started. There they were; throngs of them, fucking Chinese commandos, men in Armani suits bought by their gangster capitalist bosses who still wore Stalinist Red, weapons slung, heavy and merciless.

And not amateurs. Three of them were running a cordon, Revy's Cutlasses outstretched while Rock wheeled it around to the left, opening up a firing arc for her. The words weren't his; military tactics were about as alien a lexicon as Kiswahili. But it didn't matter. He knew _vaguely_ what to do; he'd heard it more than often enough from Revy, sometimes punctuated with a pistol jammed against his shoulder, _Lissen, you stupid motherfucker_ , or just a palm clapped at his head.

It didn't matter now; whether he succeeded or failed, well, historians would never bother committing _this_ senseless little skirmish to paper. Eda was scrabbling to the right, Glock a patient and slow cadence, Revy's Cutlasses anything but delicate.

Rock couldn't avert his eyes. It was his wish, his craving, his need, but the denial was hopeless, a wretched futility.

He could already feel the words.

_This is your fault, too, Rock._

Yeah. It  _was_ his fault, too, dammit, and there was nothing else to do. Swerving with a foot on the clutch and already pushing on a standing start, letting the engine shriek out its tormented protest. The Chinese thugs weren't in heavy battle armor; their fabric might've been station, esteem, that exalted ineffable perfection named status and face, but it was still just a bit of pricey cotton draped on mere flesh. And flesh was flesh. Starched shirts ran scarlet and the dark suits blackened further and now, now, everything was a three-hundred-and-sixty degree clusterfuck. Bullets snapped and spattered.

“ _Move it_ , Rock! Goddammit, there're only two of us. Make us a movin' fuckin' target!” No opprobrium; not snapped at him, his pussy _whatever_ , 'cause there wasn't time. And so the Plymouth was already jerking away from where the men's panicked fire was landing. Because they were hard men, yes, Party men, commandos, the élite, or at least the élite available on short notice, but there's no _joy_ in being encircled in death's sulfurous cauldron. So the rifles were a half-second slow, fingers slacker on the triggers, and that fundamental _something_ that's the half-inch, the half-percent, the _micron_ of a difference between the Survivors and the also-ran, well, maybe it wasn't there.

Revy had it. Eda, too.

The killer instinct. It was the body and the soul both honed and hardened and chiseled down, denuded of the beautiful burs and the gold-trimmed extravagances and the glorious lovely things, the needful things that become needless when the sky shatters into tangram violences and gunsmoke becomes your perfume and blood splatters and splashes and suddenly Darwin isn't only something to read about in a textbook. And Rock understood, also.

Tugging the Plymouth into reverse, feeling the gears  _almost_ grind, the teeth mesh into one another with a wolf's snapping jaws, they howled away from the spacking skipping rounds that cavorted and bounced and they ricocheted away or just flew true as designed, sightless and senseless, bits of metal spat out at almost a mile-a-second and the people they called innocent without weighing their hearts slumped or tumbled. Because death wasn't like the movies; when someone died, it was just immediate, or maybe not, but  _death_ came with a numbness that wasn't even felt, the legs sawed off even if they were still there.

The dead understood their world.

There was a delusion so many had. That the dead knew nothing. But that was bullshit. Because the dead finally actually saw  _it_ . The secret joke that wasn't really a secret at all that twisted those that had tasted it into that mirthless indelible grin. The Reaper's wry little whispers in your ear; the faces that stare out from from the rusting pickets stabbed along the lonely road into the city, announcing to anyone and everyone with the forlorn noose swaying from a bridge's rusty girders that this is not your vacation paradise.

“Shit, that was good drivin', Rock. That woulda hurt.” Revy's laughter rose up, a demoness', and Rock felt it.

Stabbed at him. Not with epiphany, but just with that constant barbed knowledge, being stitched deeper. He loved it. Felt the  _awe_ with it; incredulity that she could be  _that_ incredible, slipped a clutch of three slugs through some mope's face that turned what was once human into a ruby mist that lingered for longer than his life did.

Eda's shots popped off slower, more deliberate, and with a vicious deliberate accuracy. They were losing, though. It was obvious. Because ammunition wasn't infinite, and firepower sure as hell wasn't, and as poor as the men may have been, they weren't  _so_ poor that the quantitative burned out against the qualitative. Rock was gonna die.

He was gonna die. It wasn't fair.

“Step on it, Rock. Keep us moving. I think I see 'em!” Revy's voice an urgent crowing and Rock did, too. They were there, stealing out of a back room, door hammered down and the Chinese obviously didn't know _enough_ about the city and its native squalor and sleaze to appreciate that just about every shop with a door needed to have a _back door_ , too. Or two or three.

And there they were. Hunched,  _older_ ; Rock caught a snatch of male pattern baldness' unflattering lawnmower violence carved across the back of one of the guy's head. More importantly, they were the only anglos in a city of dark faces, and they were the only ones  _running_ when the locals knew that if you hadn't already caught the last train out  _before_ the shooting got that bad, you just went to ground and hoped the scattering skipping bullets missed your unlucky ass.

People were lucky or unlucky on a totally arbitrary basis. At best, you could finesse the odds like the playback grift, but that was it. That was  _all_ . You couldn't drag yourself into perfect success. So you just fell over where you were, and that was the truth.

The men huffed, heaved, wheezed. Rock was sure he'd caught a morsel of their speech in English, heavy and raw and razor-edged like Revy's.

“Jesus Christ, how the fuck'd these goddamn chinks get here _before_ us?!” And then everything dissolved like fine crystal melting on a stone floor when the other one, the dude with the hideous retreating hairline swept to the back of his head and an oily carpet falling down like a headdress to his dirty suit jacket, opened up.

They were both filthy, wheezing, arms straining and legs hammering at the pavement and grasping slab-sided black rifles in gnarled hands.

“There they are. C'mon, drive up to 'em, Rock, but don't hit our payday.” It was an ordeal, slaloming and shuttling through the carts, Rock not just smoothly stroking the wheel but _jerking_ it, power steering something that happened to other people, the Plymouth about as wieldy as a battle tank in those constraints. Stands still disintegrated into huge splintering sprays; Revy's cheeks were a stained glass spectacle of pulverized tropical fruit, tongue flitting out to mop up a few threads.

“Jesus, Rock, I didn't say I was lookin' for a smoothie-”

“Sorry, Revy! I'm trying!” Closer, and closer, the Chinese on-foot and a merciless athletic pursuit, obviously better-rested than the aging exhausted gunmen. They looked about a half-second from imploding; maybe it wasn't even that. They were beyond their limits, only the atavistic animal core, some insurmountable survivor's instinct honed not even in their lives but scrabbling through Olduvai, bearing them aloft.

“Hey, hey!” Eda and Revy squalling through their windows at the men that must've been, charitably, half-deaf from their own firepower. The day still steeped, boiled around them like being plunged into a bubbling cauldron of burgundy. “Hey, aren't ya gonna listen?! Slow down, Rock.” He'd overtaken them; it was counterintuitive, idiotic, not to just _flee_ from this, but, well, this was their job, wasn't it?

It wasn't comfort; wasn't sanity. It was profit.

Cash.

The engine no longer raced; the damn thing had become an inexhaustible quarter-horse slumping from a hammering gallop to a mere prance.

“Hey, are you two Adam and James?” Eda was craning through the window, and there was only perfect surreality.

The ugly men still heard it; twisted their eyes to regard the cold-eyed sneering china-doll beauty and the fucking  _nun_ staring back at them through a 'sixty-nine Plymouth's window.

There should have been a candid camera  _somewhere_ .

“Get in, assholes. C'mon. Move your fat ass over, Eda.” Eda complied without a word. “Hey, dumbasses, I strongly suggest you get your old fuckin' asses in the goddamn car before the fuckin' chinks catch up with ya.” Revy was, well, _wanting_ for diplomacy; Rock couldn't really quite hope to roar over the engine, much less the shotgun- it was a shotgun, wasn't it?- cracking from the mullet guy's arm.

“Jesus Christ, who the fuck are you people?” The other guy, well, it _must_ have been the one with the brutal scar in the photo, even if he was smeared with a vast well-groomed beard. The voice was hot, harsh, abrasive. “Chrissake.” A bullet squalled beside the guy's face. “Lynch, get in the goddamn car-”

“Jesus, Kane, what the fuck?” Kane and Lynch? Weren't their names Marcus and Lynch? Fuck it. “We dunno who these people are!” The other one, the mullet guy, Lynch, his goatee and mustache were oily, a blossom of grimy discolored auburn tufts loosely knitted together. Fucking ugly. That's what he was; even more than his partner. They were both creased with an almost playful and artful constellation of seams like old cracked marble. The guy's eyes snapped on Rock's: He was staring at Revy's, at Dutch's.

“They're offerin' us a goddamn _ride_ , Lynch. Let us in.” Kane? Adam or Kane or... Or whatever he was, the guy was snapping around, shouldering the thick black plastic gun he carted with a familiarity that said it was something more intimate to him than any woman, than any child, and popped off another six or seven rounds before the bolt clattered on an empty mag.

Rock slowed; Eda's outstretched foot ground open the door, fine leather slipper against cool metal.

“Get in, assholes. We're your ride outta here.” Revy was their emissary; Rock definitely didn't bother correcting her bedside manner, or whatever this was.

And they were piling in. Thick-gutted and aging and still drawing in reservoirs of strength that defied imagination. They were there; they  _reeked_ , stale unwashed bodies like sour onions and death and blood and madness.

“Hit it, Rock. See ya later, cocksuckers!” Revy was twisting from the window, blind-firing the Cutlasses 'til they locked empty.

It didn't matter. They were out. The Chinese had suddenly lost the advantage. Not that it mattered. Wild crazed metal hornets roared and swarmed around them. One or two _ping_ ed into the Plymouth's thick hull, tumbling and twisting and with nothing fragile or at least _needed_ broken.

Rock's ambition wasn't just to floor it but to plant the fucking pedal _through_ the metal, and there was blood's merciless hammering in his ears. Sonic middle-ground seemed to have vanished. The mullet guy, Lynch, whatever his name really was, was pivoting his heavy bulk through a window, but when the shotgun spoke, there was only perfect silence; the engine's shrill whining along its upper ranges trickled through Rock's ears, and even the sea's distant sucking at the shore, soft and morose. Voices, impossible distant voices, murmuring with the harvest of the banal: Noodles and rice and beer and raucous laughter.

“Hey, _Rock_? Aren't you fuckin' listenin'? Jesus, are you shellshocked or somethin', dumbass- _chrissake_ , stop shooting that fuckin' thing, you retard! They're not behind us anymore!” At least Revy had found someone _more_ obnoxious to terrorize. “Eda, who the fuck are these guys-”

“Who the fuck are _you_? And who the fuck are _you_ , too, nun? Who's this guy driving?” The _less_ bald man, _Kane_ , he seemed... Saner; staider. The voice was flinty, an aural essence of being dragged across ragged stone, but patient and subdued.

“Name's Eda. I'm a private contractor. This here's Revy; the guy driving's name is Rock.”

“Christ, what's this band of merry men, Kane?” Lynch, the guy with the hideous mullet sprawled across his shoulders, cradled the shotgun between his knees, fingers kneading the hot metal with scabrous scarred fingers. “Where the fuck are we, anyway? Thailand, y'said?” They didn't know _where_ they were?

“Yeah. I brought it down in a place I know. I've been here a few times. Roanapur. It's a goddamn shithole, Lynch. Just _our_ kinda shithole. It's a place to disappear into. What I don't get, and don't get me wrong, uh, Eda, right?” Kane was definitely the more diplomatic, more conciliatory. “I'm grateful; believe me.

“But what's your angle on this?”

“Oh, trust me, we've got an angle. People have an interest in getting you two out of this hellhole. You already tore it at least five or six new assholes.” Eda was definitely in _her_ element now. This was her life's essence, the deadly trade that was the _real_ blood, the hot throbbing corpuscles, racing through the economy's ragged and forever-vital arteries. “No one wants you around here.”

Kane was cagey; Rock caught a glimpse of his eyes in the rear-view. He was absolutely brutal. Relieved to be alive, maybe, but there was a quality that Rock recognized. It didn't matter. He knew that mortality was something certain, a predator that would sink its fangs into his throat _eventually_. It wasn't even with resignation. Just a cold sure knowledge.

His fingers were patient, well-practiced, snapping out his gun's magazine and letting it clatter to the floor, slipping in another, and probably the last, dredged up from his jacket's pocket.

“Hey, what's that gun, man?” Revy was enchanted with it. The cold metal and plastic.

“Some kind of Chinese gun. I don't know. It's a piece of crap; I _do_ know that. Just like everything Chinese-”

“Don't talk about the Chinese like that, Kane. Chrissake, not everything there's useless.” The other one, Lynch, his eyes were downcast now, squinting at his grimy shoes. Rock chanced a glance behind him, slipping onto the coastal highway whose long bare ambit through scraggly wild grasses and few exits would offer little hope of ambush.

It was circuitous, but it'd still guide them to the port.

“Yeah, all right, Lynch. Whatever you say, man.” They were exhausted. Rock could see it, _feel_ it. It was an exhaustion he'd known more than once. It didn't only settle in the bones but sunk further than that; it was one that took on the character of grime that time had laced into stone. It couldn't be blasted out; couldn't be wished out of existence; only could be admitted, avoided, conscientiously never letting yourself brush it lest it truly _dirty_ you.

“Anyway, you two, these people are getaway artists. Revy and Rock are some of the crew of a torpedo boat that can get you two out of here and off to Ho Chi Minh City. You can catch a flight or a long boat back to wherever you need to be after that.” Eda wasn't being totally candid with them.

Clearly.

If anyone had an interest in seeing them, then they sure as hell wouldn't be reserving a room in every city on the planet and _hoping_ the squalid pair would slump through the door.

“No, _not_ whatever I say, Kane.” And now the mullet one, Lynch, was just burbling into a froth. “Don't gimme that shit. You say it. You _admit_ it. China can- can make at least _one_ thing right. Say it, Kane, or so help me-”

“Fuck, all right, Lynch. I'll say it. China made _one_ thing good-”

“It sure as hell did, Kane. It sure as hell did. And it sure as hell didn't fuckin' deserve her. I didn't deserve her. Goddammit. God _dammit_.” Filthy hands swept up over the the man's pate, rearranged grease's and grime's whimsical whorls across his pitted skin. “Goddammit. That fuckin' city.

“I should never've come there. Fuck. Fuck. She woulda-”

“Lynch, let it go. What's done is done.” Kane made a point of jamming the rifle's barrel _up_ at the roof, snapping on the gun's safety.

“What's with him?” Revy was tact personified. “And what's wrong with that gun? Lemme see it-”

“Sure. Take the piece of shit. I don't fuckin' want it anymore.” Kane was quick, practiced; snatched up the plastic-bodied piece again, jerked out the magazine, and racked the bolt, catapulting a steely case somewhere onto the Roadrunner's floor. Revy cradled it, tossed it from her right hand to her left, her left to her right.

“Yeah. It does feel pretty flimsy. I guess the chinks can get the _shape_ right, but that's about all.” Revy slumped back, dragged in a long lingering breath, snapped out the Cutlasses' mags and slipped in another pair. The slides clattered down hard.

Lynch was already jerking up again, fingers slipping down the shotgun's battered body.

“The fuck was that? Kane, this's- this's a goddamn setup-”

“Shut up, Lynch. All right? It's not a setup. The pretty girl that _saved_ our asses just reloaded her guns. Those are some flashy pieces, sister.” It wasn't with admiration; that was obvious to Rock. And it was with awe that he heard, well, _nothing_ from Revy but a surly little, _Yeah, thanks, jackass._

“Anyway, Eda?” Kane turned to confront her with those feral black eyes. “To what do we owe the pleasure of this _very_ timely help?”

“A shitload of money, pilgrim. Don't expect any charity from me.”

“From a goddamn nun? Sound like the sisters back at Our Lady of Peace.” The guy's laughter was as mirthless as an evening with Reinhard Heydrich. “At least we're gonna get out of this shithole. I hated Roanapur when I was here the first few times.” Kane dipped closer to Eda.

He couldn't quite tease out _what_ whisper slithered from the man's lips.

But the eyes only darkened beyond black, and then he was _sure_ he caught something like, _Oh, so that's what it's about._

“I, ah, my name is Rock.” Rock was _still_ the firm's self-anointed PR rep. Turning to twist a hand laboriously with muscle-straining joint-distending ordeal at Kane. It was studied, scrutinized, and taken with a hand still sticky with sweat and tacky with blood's onyx skein. “I heard your names were Adam and James. I, ah... My real name is Okajima Rokuro. Or Rokuro Okajima-”

“Christ, Rock, give it a fuckin' rest. These guys don't need the whole _concierge_ treatment.” Of course Revy'd be sneering at him.

“Their names are Adam Marcus and James Lynch.” Eda lingered on the words with something almost triumphal.

“Nobody calls me _Adam_. The name's Kane.” Kane made a point of underscoring that like a cosmic injustice righted with a breath.

“Yeah. And they call me Lynch.” There was only silence. Even Revy withheld comment.

“Hey,” Kane's voice spiking in a sharp epiphany, “you're lookin' kinda familiar to me now. Jesus, what a senior moment. You Rebecca Lee?” Rock had _never_ heard that. He knew with a sense of abstraction, on some fundamentally academic level, that Revy wasn't actually her name. That there was a girl named Rebecca Lee who'd been transmuted in the street's violent vulgar crucible into Two Hands Revy.

But it was still unreal.

She was craning around, eyes narrowed.

“The fuck... Jesus, it really is you, ain't it? I thought it was you; I was _wondering_ if it coulda been you. You've gotten old, _Mister Seven_.” Rock didn't ask. Revy knew; Kane knew. That was more than enough for them.

“I've been out of that shit for ages.”

“Serious? Shit, how things change. You, the big important-ass merc who tried to Jew my gang down on that horse-”

“It's business, Rebecca-”

“They call me Revy now, asshole.” Was it affection? There was something not... Well, not _light_ in her eyes. It sure as hell wasn't levity. And it wasn't exactly nostalgia or sentimental _anything_. But there was...

Well, maybe it was just a commonality. _That_ , Rock could understand.

“Shit, you know these guys, Two Hands?” Eda was gawping at it.

“Yeah. I know Kane, anyway. That was his handle then. Figures he'd keep it.” Revy was murmuring now, and Rock could only taste the simple alienation in this.

When Revy was struggling, hustling, visiting violence and suffering its own cruel afflictions, well... He was a college student, dozing through lectures and aspiring to something like decadence on a part-timer's wage.

“Anyway, Rebecca- Revy, whatever. That's a _weird_ fuckin' name. You're part of this crew, huh? That suit, he's got a good angle. Keep him around.” The words were liquid ambivalence, sliding in a perfect bifurcating seam into Rock's gut.

Pride that _someone_ appreciated his decorum.

Horror that it would be a man like _that_.

“Yeah, sure. He'll stick around. He ain't got anywhere else to go.” And Rock knew it.

Or rather, Rock _understood_ it at some visceral depth. He could return to Japan. In an instant. That shit about being dead was meaningless for a man with a passport and birth certificate and rich parents and an influential brother to vouch for him.

He _went missing, presumed dead_.

There was a bureaucratic error.

An issue with papers filed at the wrong desk.

These things happen, you understand, he would accentuate with a polite half-cocked bow and the clerk with a vast plastic smile would bow and assure him that, yes, everyone understands that these kinds of things can happen, so, please, if it would not be too much trouble, and we are deeply sorry for our mistake, but would you mind signing these documents? Only a formality, Okajima- _san_.

They slipped into the Lagoon Company's lot without incident. There was no _hope_ of incident. Rock knew that Boss Chang probably _had_ little interest in indulging the Party bosses, and likely had a great deal more to fear from Balalaika if their city's tranquil numb affectations of silence were ruptured with any more ugly public mayhem.

The engine quieted, died with a last sullen grumble, and metal's subdued _tick-tick-tick_ serenaded them through the silence. Quayside birds fattened on a diet of shit scavenged from the open dumpsters and the ocean's great fecundity quailed, lissome figures V-ing through the huddled sulfurous dusk.

They were almost cartoonish, their wings' slow flap and achingly elegant kite belonging to another universe, one painted on cells and perfected with an artist's sense of the theatrical, proportions and dimensions and movement's languorous poetry finessed to _their_ satisfaction, with no regard for the truth. But this was reality.

Jagger, fuck, still the Stones marathon, opined that you can lean on him.

“Well, we're here. I'll notify Dutch about our assignment. I'm sure everyone would like to get underway as soon as possible.” And Rock was still the concierge, still the maître d', just like Revy had said. He was no warrior. His knees were perfectly firm, though, when his door jerked open, shoes clomping on the sun-bleached fissured pavement.

He'd taken leave of the fundamental terror that turned others' to gelatin. It meant nothing. It was just numbness, right? That was it. You could habituate yourself to anything.

“Hey, Rocky-baby, not even gonna open your lady's door? What kinda man are you, anyway?” Eda was catcalling from the window; the two men had slumped into a semi-catatonia. It was strange, peering at them.

Rock was transfixed. For just a moment, there was something... Ineffably familiar in their posture. In Kane's straight-spined intensity, less martial and more just an iron-stern discipline wrought from a _will_ to be. Lynch slumped against the door, slovenly, the eyes miserable and slitted like a cat's, tears' wet rheumy slick a still puddle.

“Ah, yeah, sure.” And he did. Expecting something horrible from Revy, and hearing nothing at all. No guffawing, and no snorting. No Galahad bullshit. The .45 that she'd given him was still there, a moist warmth against his hip. His shirt had come untucked, or at least one of the front tails, dragged over it.

“Shit, Rock, you almost look like a real gangster like that.” Was that approval from Revy? Eyes squinting in the sodden light that sloshed through the still lot, animated with the Stones' chattering honkeytonk and Keith Richards' warbling guitar.

Jagger's obnoxious reedy affectation.

“Yeah. I- I guess so, Revy-”

“Shit, Xiu. Xiu!” And now Lynch was springing out of the car, hands outstretched, a nightmare staggering zombie whose eyes had melted down into a twinkling stardust psychosis. Kane was a half-step behind him on slack limbs, fueled again with a simple desperation, but it wasn't enough.

Lynch was fucking _heavy_ ; that was the only thought clattering through Revy when the slobbering asshole was springing at her, heavy oleaginous _stink_ enameling itself on her nostrils and the bastard's huge eyes and gruesome Frankenstein's monster face filling every sense.

“W-what the fuck, man-”

“Xiu! Xiu! It's me, Lynch! It's Lynch! You're okay! You're okay! I- I thought for sure... I- I knew it- I knew it couldn't be true. I- we're here to save you, Xiu!” His simple _enormity_ pinned her, bound her; every inch _roared_ with the will to heave him off, to jab a knee between his legs, to drag out a Cutlass and geld him, but it wasn't possible.

The guy was fat, but there was enough strength shot through it, lunatic histrionic strength, to dwarf even Revy's.

“Xiu!” And he was braying it, bellowing it. Kane's voice struggled to rear up over it, hoarse and raw from probably a few millennia's screaming.

“Jesus Christ, Lynch! Lynch, you stupid motherfucker-”

“Get this fat fuckin' psycho off me! Fuck! I'm gonna kill you, asshole! I don't give a fuck if you're a client or not; you're goddamn dead!” Revy's face had distorted itself into an awful mask that, well, Rock would never have even admitted to _himself_ aloud alone and nestled behind enough steel to ward off an anti-tank missile, but it was vulnerable.

The familiar iron strength had deserted her.

There was real fear.

It, well, it animated him.

Standing there, feeling Kane's bulk displace a huge rush of a gust in the still lot, _Sympathy for The Devil_ warbling its first few ominous strains through his ears, it wasn't some inane chivalric compulsion; it wasn't a dumbass need to prove his masculinity, either. It was an unreal serenity.

He could be violent, also.

“Lynch, you dumb fuck! Get your fuckin' hands off 'er! It ain't Xiu! Don't you remember-”

“Xiu! Xiu!” Fat scalding tears stippled Revy's cheeks; she was almost melting down now into a rubber-limbed revulsion. Horror had colonized her.

That corpulent bulk squeezing, cinching down on her.

Kane's hands struggled, wrenched at Lynch.

It wasn't nearly enough.

“Get your fucking hands _off_ her, you bastard.” And now, well, Rock was a bystander to his own life. He'd always been. It wasn't quite _that_ , though. Wasn't staring from the countless ranks of judgmental eyes at his high school graduation, bowing and scraping and understanding viscerally that he was a disappointment, that he'd only been in the upper quartile for his end-of-year exams, and not the most accomplished five percent _guaranteed_ admission to Todai.

Or his parents', staring down the _ronin_ shame that huddled at the table in a garden of cram books and reeking of stale coffee and cigarettes.

Or his professors', his few girlfriends', the incidental social satellites with whom he wheeled that he deluded himself were _friends_ '.

His eyes were his own. A quirk of the camera; a trick of the light. But it was still scuffed and battered metal and coarse wood in his right hand, outstretched. It didn't tremble. His hand should have trembled.

It should have been a pair, struggling with the Colt's heft, but it wasn't.

It was too light. Too fucking light by _half_.

“Get your fuckin' hands off her, you asshole! I'll kill you if you don't right. Fucking. _Now_.”

“Xiu!” The bastard's sob was awful, blasting up from the gut, and not merely from the flesh but from a poisoned stoma in the soul. So Rock felt it. The sharp shuddering recoil in its butt _snapping_ against the fat bald guy's jaw. He knew a blow to the temple wasn't some prepackaged cinematic convenience.

It'd probably kill him.

But there was still a heavy wet _crack_.

Was enough to slacken his grasp; Kane supplied the last of the violence to topple him, tipped like a heap of trash tumbling from an overturning truck across the freeway.

“Lynch, you fuckin' psycho! Do that again, and I'm gonna goddamn _kill_ you. You got me?! You already fucked up everything in fuckin' Shanghai, and then you fuckin' do _that_ -”

“You ain't no saint, Kane. You ain't no saint. T-the fuck did you do? Why'd'ja hit me, you little slant-eyed punk!?” Oh, _fuck_. And now reality coursed along at approximately Mach fifty. The fat bald guy was rearing up and his height _dwarfed_ Rock's.

Rock could trace the man's callused fist like surveying one of the birds in flight.

And then his brain slapping against his skull and then the universe, or at least the Lagoon Company's scarred parking lot, flaring up to greet him; the fat asshole's tennis shoe, wait, he was wearing tennis shoes with a suit, the asshole, _crunching_ into his gut.

“Hey, motherfucker! Calm your pet psycho's tits before I collect _half_ the goddamn reward. Got me?” Eda. It was Eda. And the other guy, Kane, his strength was finally _enough_ to jerk Lynch away.

“Lynch, goddammit, these people are fuckin' _saving our lives_. I swear to god, you do something like that again, and I'm gonna buy you a fuckin' straitjacket-”

“The bastard punk hit me.” That was his defense? That was his fucking _defense_? Rock... Well, if it hadn't been for his liver mantling up into his mouth with fantasies of opening up a women's boutique in Tegucigalpa, he would've sputtered with incredulity. Lynch sounded legitimately _defensive_ , affronted that his dignity had been impugned.

“'cause it looked like you were tryin' to mount his goddamn girlfriend, you asshole. Stupid motherfucker.” Rock had finally summoned the strength in limbs some mischievous divinity had alloyed with lead to drag himself onto his spine, flopped out with a cheek clasped against Revy's thigh. Soft; oh so achingly soft. “Lynch, I'm serious about this.

“Eda, I'm so sorry about this dumbass, all right-”

“The- I didn't fuckin' do that. I didn't fuckin' do that. I didn't fuckin' _do that_ , Kane. That's bullshit.” Lynch was at least stalking off. And the shotgun was still forgotten in the Roadrunner.

Its engine's creak dwarfed Rock's own breath.

Birds capered and cavorted in achingly beautiful aerobatics.

Brown sugar just tasted so good. Just like a black girl should.

“Jesus Christ.” And Kane's shoes clopped after him. “Listen, I'm sorry, all right, Eda? Chrissake, this guy...” Eda vanished, too.

Not a word.

Revy lay there. A long interval. Maybe ten or fifteen or thirty breaths. That was time's increment for Rock. She stirred. Finally. Slowly, a plodding elephantine gracelessness, hauling herself into a sit up. A palm settled on his cheek.

“You alive, Rock?”

“Yuh.” He could at least grind out _that_ monosyllable through the gongs jovially celebrating a New Year and maybe a new fucking millennium between his ears.

“That was pretty heroic shit, Rock. Pulling that piece. I mean, it woulda been a helluva lot more amazing if you'd, y'know, had a bullet in the chamber. Did you know that?” He hadn't.

“I- I didn't pull the trigger, anyway-”

“Dumbass.” It was a tribute to Revy's _something_ that she spoke it with something like delicacy, warmth, real affection. Fingers, long and fine and sleek, twisted through his hair. She filled his sight; didn't even have the dignity to introduce her two identical twin sisters. They took their leave without any real fanfare, dispelled with a long blink that granted Rock an intimate acquaintance with his lashes. “You got a concussion?”

“I think I'm okay.”

“Nobody's okay in this city. But I'd say you're all right, Rock.” And she stood. Turned.

And then turned again, craning down to jab a hand out at him.

“Here, jackass. I don't trust you to get up on your own. Lazy prick. You'd probably just take a nap out here, listenin' to the radio. Don't expect anybody to pay you if you're just gonna laze around all day.”

“Yeah.” Uncountably many adorable quips misted Rock's thoughts in witty constellations. And he found purchase on none of them. Oh, well. Her hand was warm, soft against his; fingers twisted around his own. Weightless, levitating to rear up those few inches he actually had on her.

“Turn off the radio when you're done, Rock. You did a good job.”

“Yeah.”

The sea was an enchanted iridescent gem, a rarefied opal that some beneficent divinity had draped upon the land, a private bliss for those with the simple and almost unprecedented sense to open their eyes and appreciate reality as it was, simply as it was, and not as it could be or had been. Potential didn't exist here; the past and the future and even the present, understood as it was those infinitesimally tiny intervals of seconds after it really _happened_ , didn't exist here.

There was only the _now_. That was how Rock understood it, anyway, hunched on the deck, still nursing the migraine that fat bald psychopath's fist had sewn in his head. Dutch was at the helm; the torpedo boat's engine thrummed, belching avgas fumes' leaden stink in a great billowing drift behind them. The _Lagoon_ crested the subdued wavelets with a nimble effortless elegance while the dawn became morning, while bright warmth alloyed the night's cool brine.

Shoes clapped behind him.

“Hey.” It wasn't even Benny or Revy; it was that nutcase's partner, Kane. Who must have been nuts, also, to suffer the lunatic. Rock had huddled on the _Lagoon_ 's warming hull, legs tucked against his chest, savoring the torpedo's steely chill against a cheek. He admired a universe that was a unity in heaven and earth, sky and sea becoming one sublime aquamarine mosaic.

“Hey.” But, well, Rock was still concierge, wasn't he? Craned around, regarded Kane with eyes squinting against the sun's seething sulfur jewel. At least he had the dignity to slump beside Rock. He'd showered at some point, draped himself in one of Dutch's getaway loaner wardrobes.

A simple tourist now, unarmed, innocuous but for the scars' candor, some deeper than others, the sinewy meat. The man was obviously _not_ soft; couldn't aspire to a delicate thought or deed. He was ragged, brutish, the product of a sculptor that thought in huge crude slabs and adored veins like obese earthworms.

The man's gut, fat and gristle and strength, strained up through a Hawaiian shirt gaudy with a demented floral tenebrism in rich neon blossoms against a forlorn shadowed backdrop, distant wet jungle rot. Muscular stocky legs stabbed through khaki shorts.

Rock's answer wasn't inspired. But what the hell else could he have said? He knew _nothing_ about this man. Kane. Barring that it wasn't even the man's name. And still, what did it matter? There was a reason, even if the reason was nothing but a reasonless succession of causalities that ended in _that_ instant.

Rock had begun to understood that no one really plotted their life's course. There was that fiction, that delusion, but it was as meaningful as just casting out dice, as pulling a trigger. You never really knew what path the bullets would take. Even Rock grasped that.

“Like the shirt?” Kane cradled a beer in his right hand; the left fastened around one of the weathered cleats that splintered up like a dental crown from the hull. “Your captain, Dutch, he's a pretty interesting guy. Spent a few hours talking to him.

“Vietnam vet, huh?” Kane was being conciliatory, Rock figured; that was the only reason a guy with his voice, his eyes, would even _bother_ talking to Rock like that. It wasn't quite gentle. Rock wondered sincerely if there were anything _like_ gentleness still lurking in the meat behind his eyes, between his ears; if there were even a soul still to steward it.

“Yeah. I- I guess so.”

“That dumbass didn't really hurt you, did he? You're a young guy; an old fart like that shouldn't be able to do too much. Lynch and me, we're getting too old for this kinda shit. We were over the hill years ago, y'know.” Kane raised the tawny glass to his lips. Condensation wrought protean mosaics over the bottle, pattered down to darken his khakis.

“I- I don't really know. I'm all right. I've still got kind of a headache.”

“Yeah. I saw that. Hit your head pretty hard on the pavement. For what it's worth, I'm sorry. That guy... Jesus Christ, makin' me make apologies for him like he's my whacked-out brother. But he's not, y'know, he's not _well_. Lynch, I mean.” That would've been obvious to Stevie Wonder in a sensory deprivation tank.

Kane dragged a long breath into his lungs, perfumed with the sea air.

“I don't usually get times like these. Just watchin' the sea. I'm gonna kinda miss it, riding on a boat like this.” The eyes were inscrutable. They never quite met Rock's. “Vietnam's an okay place, though. I was too young to serve in 'nam. My old man did, though.

“Came back with all his limbs intact, and his mind gone. Just like Lynch, come to think of it.”

“What's wrong with your friend? He's ill, right?” Rock was still just so achingly fucking _tactful_ , patient, polite. Scraping and magnanimous and Japanese.

“Yeah, you could say that. He left his pills back in Shanghai. He's, ah, whaddayacallit, a medicated schizophrenic. Your boss set us up with some more; he's sleepin' off the shit in one of your cabins. Thanks a lot. The guy's a fuckin' pain in my ass when he's _okay_ , much less with...

“Well, it's been a trying few days.” A hand that was like Rock's father's, _large_ , larger than his, clapped on Kane's nape. “I'll just say that.”

“You two are partners, right, uh-”

“Call me Kane, kid. Nobody calls me _Adam_.”

“Kane. Are you two partners?”

Kane lingered on the beer, let the frothing bitter waters slosh through his teeth, roil between his cheeks.

“How do I put this? I don't seem to be able to put the guy far enough in the past that he stops turnin' up like a bad nickel.” Kane finally answered with a blink so long and slow and reptilian that Rock seriously wondered if maybe not _all_ humans were descended of apes. The skin was rough and almost scaled with the elements, craggy and leathered. The voice was coarser still.

“Do you even like him?”

“Shit? Lynch? The guy's a fuckin' pain in my ass.”

“Why were you even with him, then?”

“It's a _real_ long story, ah... Rock, right? That's quite the name for a Japanese. You said it was Rokuro? Why's it just _Rock_ now?”

“That's a real long story, Kane.” The laughter was sincere.

“Anyway... I came to see Lynch in Shanghai because he said he'd got his shit together, needed my help for a job. I needed a job. Mostly... Y'know, sometimes, when you run away from what's eating you, you start to understand- you got this _clarity_. You know what's really important in your life.

“Lynch has this weird fuckin' way of making me see what's important. Maybe it's because he's just- he's such a _goddamn loser_. It follows him like a bad cloud.” Those huge hands, goddamn, they were nothing like Rock's. Was it the chemistry that sloshed through the water and befouled the food that had denuded him of testosterone, or was it something evolutionary? His grandfather's hands were even _huger_ , like Kane's, outstretched to the ocean. “It's not fair, y'know.

“Maybe... It's business, but the reason I tolerate the guy is 'cause he didn't get a fair shake. He's fucked. In the head. I'm real sorry about him hitting you, freaking out with your girlfriend. That Rebecca, she's...” It was admiring, Kane's chin scribing a slow approving shake. He was shaved now, pared down to the broad jaw. “She's a pretty amazing chick.

“I knew her back when she was working New York. What a _punk_ , talkin' to people in my position like that. I used to be a big somebody in a past life. That one's dead now, 'course. Christ, I sound like an old man.

“Guess I am.” Kane finished the beer, clamped it between his legs.

Rock could feel the words.

The inquisition.

The _craving_ to taste that simple truth, the reality that was _Rebecca Lee;_ the girl before the woman; the Genesis; the words _In the beginning..._

And then just crumpled the questions, that plea for those perfect answers, because she wasn't Rebecca Lee anymore, was she?

She was Revy.

“They killed his girl, y'know. Lynch's. I'm just telling you that so you don't get any weird ideas. Looked nothin' like Rebecca. Just Chinese, and so different only _Lynch_ could mistake 'em for each other. It was evil, the way they did it.

“Believe me. I know evil.” Rock, well, he could _smell_ it. The reek of filth and violence and pitiless inhumanity wafting from Kane, even with the blood's and gunpowder's stink scoured from his skin. The eyes never softened, and there was nothing to whisper phantasmal beautiful delusions to him that it was just a put-on, a hype to persuade him that the man was harder than the stare. Because it wasn't just brittle ice that would implode into a soulful tortured warp underneath.

They were frozen through, and they knew it.

“What are you going to do now, then, Kane?”

“Mmm. Well, go back to the States, I guess. Eda's people want to talk to us. I've got an idea what about, too. And that's okay.” The answer was so achingly neutral that Rock couldn't intuit whether it was a man resigned to a firing squad or someone who'd won the lottery.

“It's hard, isn't it, Kane? To work with a guy like Lynch? Someone who just... Just resorts to violence without thinking, who doesn't really notice what he does to people around him?” The words were idiotic. They were his; not Kane's. Rock knew nothing about him.

But that wasn't what the conversation was. It was shadowboxing with half-realized images, black inky things that pirouetted and melted away the instant you tried to put your hands on them with a guileless certainty.

Kane said absolutely nothing at all for awhile.

Peered out across the sapphire sea and luxuriated in the brine.

“You gonna stick around with Rebecca?” They both could have pretended that was just some fanciful little non sequitur.

“Her name's Revy, Kane.” Rock knew what the only answer was. The only answer that lay in _his_ thoughts. Hell, maybe his soul.

Let it all bleed out.

 


End file.
